That face now wore a sadly discontented look under the pale yellow bonnet. She twisted on the chair and sighed, looked at the clock, and bent to make certain once more of the smooth fit of her stocking. Sara felt that in some way she was failing Elizabeth. She had spread before her all the things that she imagined a young girl delighted in ‒ gave her clothes and an unstinted round of entertainment. But it was obviously not what Elizabeth wanted. Soon after her arrival in England she had gone on a visit to her Gloucestershire relations. Since it was winter, she had bought two magnificent hunters, and had expected to remain until the end of the hunting season. After four weeks she was back in the house in Golden Square, and there had been none of the exhilaration about her Sara had expected. She had little to say about her hunting, and less about the relations. She had come back quietly, flinging herself into an extravagant orgy of clothes-buying which Sara guessed was a futile compensation for whatever had gone wrong. Later David mentioned casually that Elizabeth had written to him from Gloucestershire with an invitation for him to come and hunt also, and he had refused it.
‘About this evening …’ Sara began again. ‘Did David say why he wasn’t coming?’
‘No … he merely said he didn’t think Lady Fulton would be offended so long as I went. It seems there’s something else he prefers to do!’ And as she spoke, Elizabeth’s hands gripped the edge of the chair tightly, and she scowled.
‘Well … you don’t have to come,’ Sara answered reluctantly. ‘I expect I can make excuses for you both.’
‘Good! Well then, that’s settled,’ Elizabeth said briskly.
Suddenly Sara wanted to smack her ‒ to drum into her a few of the manners that Louis would have expected from her. Louis would never have stood such behaviour in a young girl, and Sara knew she should put a stop to it somehow. But Elizabeth was not her own daughter; she had a mind and temperament which only Louis himself could have dealt with successfully. Then she looked again at the other’s miserable face, and repented of her impatience. In the uneasy silence that fell between them, Sara wished she could have gone and put her arms about her ‒ but in her present mood Elizabeth would have resented it furiously.
With relief Sara listened to the footsteps in the passage, and then her feeling faded as David tapped and put his head round the door.
‘Good morning, Mother.’
He walked round the side of the bed, seating himself on the end of it and eyeing the tray. ‘I see Elizabeth has got here before me and finished the toast.’
‘Since you all make such a habit of coming, I can’t think why you don’t have breakfast here and be done with it. Where’s Duncan?’ she added, in the same breath.
‘Riding in the Park,’ David said carelessly. ‘I must say he chooses a very unfashionable hour for it.’
‘Oh … you make me tired!’ Elizabeth burst out. ‘Duncan is the only one of us who has the sense to go when there’s room to ride. There’s such a crush in the afternoons ‒ and still everyone continues to go. As stupid as sheep!’
‘My dear Elizabeth, if you want to call yourself a sheep you may, but I …’
‘Oh, hush!’ Sara cried. ‘Really, I shall have to ask you not to come in here unless you can stay ten minutes without quarrelling. It’s too childish …’
David leaned over and patted her hand. ‘What a nuisance we are to you … and yet if you banished me from this room l should feel obliged to do something desperate.’
Sara looked from one to the other with a sick feeling in her heart ‒ from Elizabeth’s discontented face to David’s bland and non-committal one. She was brought up sharply against the realization that they had both altered alarmingly since their arrival in England, and she felt that long ago she had lost control of the situation. They were growing like everyone else in London ‒ fed on a surfeit of pleasures until they were too tired and bored to care what became of them. Look at them now, she thought angrily ‒ sprawling here, both of them, in her bedroom, at the time in the morning when they should have had other things to occupy them, picking at one another irritably, and yawning as they looked at the clock. At Glenbarr, or Banon, such a thing could never have happened. In the colony David’s time had been fully taken up with his own duties, and, in a lesser fashion, so had Elizabeth’s. She wished desperately, as she looked at them, that they had never left New South Wales. Six months here had very nearly succeeded in ruining both of them ‒ and in a further six months they’d hardly be fit to return to the colony, even if they wanted to. Look at David ‒ the decisions he made these days were over matters no more important than the cloth his coat should be made from, or which of his invitations he would accept, and which decline. Occasionally he went on visits into the country to the homes of the acquaintances he made, and when he returned Sara questioned him fearfully, wondering if he wasn’t becoming too attracted by the life of the English country gentleman. Was he beginning to think of his life in the colony as too dull and too hard-working by comparison with what he saw here? It was a bitter thing for her to have to question whether any son of Andrew’s might be fighting shy of work.
Until this time she had been reluctant to admit what a disappointment David was proving ‒ but this morning, coupling him with Elizabeth in her thoughts, she saw it more clearly than ever before. She wondered if it was her own fancy, or was he beginning to adopt the languid airs and speech fashionable among the young dandies; did he care more now for the fold of his neckcloth than for what was happening to Priest’s and Dane Farm? Where was the ambition she had hoped to discover in him? He seemed all too content to accept the world as it was, instead of striving to shape it more to his own liking, as Andrew had set out to do. If this was what money did to one’s children, she thought bitterly, then it would have been better if they had never moved beyond the first modest prosperity of Kintyre.
And yet, in his very aloofness there was power. It would only need him to say firmly that he intended to go back to the colony, and Duncan ‒ and probably Elizabeth ‒ would follow him unquestioningly. This was one matter in which Duncan was still too young and unprepared to take the lead. David had the power to change it all ‒ and yet the weeks went by and he said nothing, did nothing.
‘Are you driving this afternoon?’ Elizabeth asked her idly.
‘I thought I might go around to Fitzroy Square to inquire how Captain Flinders is …’
David straightened, looking at her directly. ‘Flinders …? Not Matthew Flinders, Mother?’
‘Yes. I’ve run him to earth finally … They’ve moved so often it’s been like a paperchase to follow them.’
‘What’s the matter with him … is he ill?’
‘He’s dying, David ‒ dying of a disease they call “the gravel”. He’s in pain the whole time, and only half-conscious these past weeks. And there’s very little money … He’s kept himself alive just to see his book through the press, and I begin to doubt now that he’ll live to see a finished copy.’
Elizabeth’s face wrinkled with concern. ‘Oh … how sad! Is he married?’
Suddenly David broke in. ‘Yes … I remember now. He is married. He used to talk about her ‒ Anne, her name was, and he had married her only about three months before he sailed in the Investigator. God … how many years ago can that be? I was a child then.’
‘It must be about thirteen years ago,’ Sara said thoughtfully. ‘Poor Flinders …! As you say, David, he left almost as soon as he married Anne, and he didn’t see her again for more than nine years. That was the time he spent charting the coast of New South Wales ‒ and the six and a half years as prisoner of the French, on Île de France.’
‘The book of the voyage …’ David said. ‘It’s completed, you say?’
Sara nodded. ‘Two volumes and an atlas. But they’ve stolen his greatest pleasure, even from that. He called it, A Voyage to Australia. But they’ve insisted it should be retitled, A Voyage to Terra Australis. If ever anyone deserved the honour of naming the continent it’s Flinders, but it seems
even that is to be taken from him.’
‘Australia …’ Elizabeth murmured ‘How soft it is …’
‘Whom do you mean by “they”,’ David burst out. ‘Who’s stopping it?’
Sara shrugged. ‘The Admiralty, the Royal Society … Sir Joseph Banks is against it, and his word seems to be law where Flinders’ book is concerned.’
David frowned heavily. ‘So … the Great South Land belongs to the Admiralty, does it? And the man who mapped it counts for nothing. He’s given his life to putting their blasted continent on paper, but he’s not permitted to name it …’
He got to his feet, and strode to the window, his hands clasped behind his back rigidly. ‘It’s the same stupid sense of officialdom that ruins everything in New South Wales. The Colonial Office is ten … fifteen years behind the most progressive of the settlers, but still sheafs of restricting orders keep coming from Government House. Control … Control … keep everyone bound in tightly. Look at the question of the sheep. The colony could send England every pound of merino wool she could use, if only they’d give the settlers as much pasture as they need.’
‘But they’re expanding all the time, David,’ Sara said.
‘Expanding …!’ he repeated. ‘Timidly pushing a few miles to the north and the south! The Colonial Office won’t spend any money, and so we’re all doomed to stagnate on the edge of the country, until the sheep and cattle eat us out of pasture. I tell you, it’s damnable!’
If Sara had dared she would have smiled for the pure joy of hearing him talk like this. Not for months had he been roused to such a degree, and it seemed weeks since he had even mentioned the colony. She began to wonder if perhaps this very point he raised was the reason for his disinterest. Had he begun to lose hope in the future of the colony? He had been given land that was already cleared and prosperous, and it was not sufficient for him ‒ the quiet, dull farms needed no gust of energetic planning to help them. With the exception of Dane Farm, they were well run and paying good profits while he was still a child. She wondered if he truly believed the picture he had painted of the future ‒ the population and livestock growing within the limits of their coastal strip, until there was not room for them all.
‘The mountains, David … Have you forgotten that a way has at last been found to cross them?’ she said quietly. ‘Surely you can’t have forgotten all the letters we had about Blaxland and Lawson going off with D’Arcy Wentworth’s son, and finding a way through.’
‘Of course I haven’t forgotten,’ he said impatiently. He turned to face her, and he looked angry. ‘And I’ve been waiting ever since to hear more of it … but there’s been nothing. All right … I know Charlie Wentworth found a way through the mountains, but we had that news last January, and there’s been not another word since. It’s a nine days’ wonder. And what is the Government doing about it? Precisely nothing. Charlie Wentworth says they saw excellent country from the ridges … But do the Colonial Office direct that a road be made, so that settlement can begin? ‒ not they! It would mean that a little section of the community would move out beyond the control of Government House, and that would never do. Shall I quote the Sydney Gazette to you, Mother, on the subject of the discoveries of Messrs. Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth? It called their trek a “trackless journey into the interior” and described the country they saw as one “which time may render of importance and utility”. That’s the enthusiasm of the Government for you! That’s the reason why men like Flinders must break their hearts and their bodies over official stupidity.’
He scowled. ‘I tell you it makes me sick to think of it.’ Then he became aware of Sara’s startled expression, and his own features relaxed. ‘I’m sorry, Mother. I didn’t mean to shout.’ He gestured expressively with his hands. ‘I think I must have a walk and get rid of some of my ill-humour.’
He looked down at Elizabeth. ‘Since you’ve already got your bonnet on, you might as well come with me. It’ll do you good. I notice you’re not much in favour of walking these days.’
She got to her feet eagerly. ‘Yes ‒ of course I’ll come!’ With misgiving, Sara watched the slow radiance that had begun to shine on her face.
II
Richard Barwell’s carriage came to a halt before No. 14 London Street, Fitzroy Square. The sun of the June afternoon was not kind to the mean-looking street, with the rows of shabby brown houses, the paint peeling and chipping from most of them. Farther along a family was moving out; their rolled bundles of mattresses and linen were displayed in their poverty to all the world. The children who made the thoroughfare hideous by day with their increasing noise, had gathered about the removalist’s cart, fighting and tumbling over the shabby furniture standing on the pavement. But the arrival of the smart carriage, with the liveried coachman and footman on the box, attracted instant attention, and with whoops they descended upon it to watch for the occupants to alight.
A saucy imp of a girl about ten years old, wearing a soiled mob cap, came close to the door and peered in.
‘Well …’ she announced to her companions. ‘If it isn’t the Czar of Russia!’
Shrieks of laughter greeted this remark, but the rest of the children stood shyly back, retreating ever farther as the footman climbed down off the box and went to pull at the ancient door bell. After some time a neat, tired-looking woman appeared. Richard opened the door of the carriage and got out. The woman crossed the pavement towards him.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought Madame de Bourget with me ‒ we’ve come to inquire about Captain Flinders.’
The woman peered uncertainly into the carriage, but as Sara got down, her expression altered.
‘Oh, yes … I remember,’ she said. ‘You’re the lady who’s come before to see the Captain and Mrs. Flinders. Well … I shouldn’t go up now if I were you. Mrs. Flinders, poor thing, came down ten minutes ago, and said that he was sleeping at last. She left the little girl with me, and stepped out for some air.’
‘How is Captain Flinders?’ Sara asked.
The woman shook her head. ‘Bad, Ma’am ‒ bad! Now that the book’s off his hands at last, he’s sort of given up. He doesn’t seem to know what’s happening to him half the time with the pain, and the doctor doesn’t do any good. Terrible, isn’t it,’ she observed, ‘what diseases these sailors pick up in foreign parts?’
Sara nodded. ‘Well … thank you. We’ll not disturb Captain Flinders, then. Perhaps you’ll tell Mrs. Flinders we called?’ As she spoke, she took the covered basket which the footman had lifted from the carriage, and handed it to the woman. ‘Mrs. Flinders may find these useful.’
‘Oh, yes, ma’am … And who shall I tell her came?’
Sara turned back. ‘Oh … tell her Sara de Bourget and Captain Barwell.’
The woman nodded, repeated the names, stumbling a little over Sara’s, and then stood with the basket in her hand to watch the carriage go.
As they turned into Fitzroy Square, Sara touched Richard’s arm. ‘Would you mind if I didn’t come with you to the Park, Richard? It’s stupid of me, but I don’t think I can face the crowds. If there’s the least chance of the Czar driving out, they’ll be there in their thousands.’
‘Certainly ‒ I’ll tell Simmons. Where would you like to go? Shall we drive through Marylebone ‒ or Primrose Hill?’
Sara shook her head. ‘I think I’d prefer to go back to Golden Square. Hearing about Flinders has left me in no mood for idling away the afternoon. In a way, Richard, I’m glad we couldn’t see his wife. I feel as if I’m insulting them by handing over my basket. Flinders deserves so much better treatment from the Admiralty ‒ and yet they’re so short of money that they can’t refuse even such things as my miserable basket. This morning David …’
Richard put his head out of the window and gave the coachman directions to return to Golden Square. He settled himself back against the seat again.
‘What was that about David?’
‘He was talking about Flinders so w
ildly this morning. I had never realized before that he felt so strongly about the mismanagement of these affairs. He ranted on about the way the colony was being run ‒ shouted at me. One would have thought he hated it.’
‘Perhaps he does ‒ have you ever tried questioning him about it?’
Sara shrugged. ‘It’s as easy to question David as to question the Sphinx. He’s self-sufficient ‒ far too much so. Except when he has one of these outbursts, he’s my pleasant-mannered, smiling son, and one can never even guess what’s going on in his head. He never speaks of it, and yet I feel his discontent growing with each week we have been here. Elizabeth too ‒ they’re so restless, and dissatisfied.’
‘Could you be to blame for that, Sara?’
‘I? ‒ in what way?’
‘Your own discontent, my dear. It’s a very catching malady.’
She twisted around to stare at him closely. He sat where the sun came fully on his face, showing the lines that were now deep about his eyes, and the grey in his hair ‒ the streak above the old scar on his forehead was pure white. But he still had the bronze of the long summers in the colony, and his spare-framed body seemed scarcely to have thickened at all since the Romney Marsh days. He was remarkably handsome, and despite the stiff shoulder, which was the legacy of the Spanish campaign, he moved with grace and ease, and still sat a horse superbly. For Richard these days life was a gracious and pleasant affair; his good humour was boundless because there was never anything to disturb it. He had been welcomed back to the drawing-rooms of his old acquaintances with a warmth that might have turned anyone’s head; he merely smiled and accepted his popularity with a modesty which he must have known was intensely becoming to him.
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