Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  She asked me then, straight out, did I like trolls named Cecily, since Cecily was her name. I remember assuring her that I particularly admired that name. I launched into encomiums in its honour. Then, inevitably, she asked me what I considered time spent with a Cecily might cost. Did I think it might be worth 10 shillings? Man of business even in my cups, I beat her down to a mere crown.

  The next morning I was of course in hell, but towards afternoon I began to feel that I might at some remote time live and breathe and have moral being. I met Barley at one stage in the corridor, where his freckles showed up on preternatural pallor. ‘I leave for Sydney this afternoon, dear Bettany. Will you not come this year and lave yourself in harbour?’

  I assured him that I would visit him one year, but I felt unworthy of his hearth, of any urbane hearth.

  ‘I needed my dear wife to act as rudder in my folly.’ His pronunciation – ‘rooder’ – and his woeful face restored me momentarily to laughter, but it did not last. For distraction that forenoon I sat in the parlour, and waited to gather myself for my own departure by doing a little book work in my journal on the glittering price received per pound, and the more I wrote and made those lifeless figures, the more I was convinced that what I clearly needed was a wife and helpmeet. Land and a flock were no longer adequate.

  I returned to Nugan Ganway, and tried to lose myself in work at that slacker, summer time of year. All that season I expected some pernicious display to break out in my flesh as punishment for my sportive, drunken night with the woman at the Black Huts. No sign of the disease presented itself though. Accursed Cecily, whom I had for some minutes or hours mistaken for a creature of splendour, was a woman to be praised in that regard.

  And on some days Miss Phoebe Finlay in adult form, a being of inexact, fair features, returned to my mind as my possible and fated spouse. At others, riding out to check on my out-stations, I would find myself dismissing this child-bride from my head and making a stern pledge to attend the Squatters’ Ball the next January.

  As if to reproach me and mock my need, a compelling missive reached me, by way of Finnerty’s wagon.

  Genève,

  May 24 of Anno Domini 1838

  Dear Mr Bettany,

  I am normally prevented by reasons of propriety from writing to anyone other than my family. I write to you in horror at the concept of you which my father seems to promote in his letters to me, and I hope that you do not suffer from these slanders where you are. Since I know them to be false, they therefore make me truer. I look forward on my return to New South Wales to taking my own direction and to making independent choices. If our compact stands, I am still prepared to be your wife, for I retain a true affection. I shall see you in your distant station, and enjoy the prospect.

  Yours sincerely,

  Phoebe Finlay

  PS: Do not answer this, as I will not be allowed to receive it.

  I thought, this is not like the letter her father read to me. This had a levelly determined tone, and a certain restraint: ‘true affection’ was invoked, a relatively modest emotion. I considered writing to her anyhow and asking her on the basis of her obvious maturity of attitude to refrain from such letters. But then I thought, would she use any letter of mine as a stick to enrage her dangerous father?

  I was secure that between Phoebe and me lay oceans and continents of other men, English clergymen, soldiers, scholars, ships’ officers, merchants, gentlemen farmers. I was content to see how her ‘true affection’ would last these contacts. And yet with one side of my mind I relished her letter, and hoped that she would appear one day, an ivory woman amongst my leathered men.

  There was at this season a considerable time to daydream. Long and I were engaged in the practice – though Long’s thoughts seemed too sombre ever to be called by that sunny title ‘daydream’ – one dusk in our homestead at the heart of wild pastures, not yet stricken with the first frost, when he put his mug of tea down, stood up and told me a party of horsemen, out of our sight from here, were bearing down on the Murrumbidgee stream which lay below our hill, and approaching our homestead. He had a remarkable set of senses and yet I doubted what he said. A party? Parties had no reason to come to Nugan Ganway.

  I considered drawing out my carbine and ball cartridges which lay under my lath bed. Long waved a lean hand in the blue light. ‘It could be the county hunt,’ he said, and his mouth cracked open in silent laughter. Yet we both felt a reclusive annoyance at being intruded upon. We walked without arms out of the boulder-clad basin in which our house stood, and by the stockyard Clancy, O’Dallow and Presscart had also gathered, frowning. We beheld, coming down the opposing slope to the river, a group of six mounted men, one of whom resembled a figure stumbled into Nugan Ganway from a European opera. He was mounted on a beautiful grey, almost silver in that light, and wore a shining pillbox hat, a brilliant green jacket of a military cut, blue trousers, and gleaming boots suited to a Napoleonic cavalry charge. My fellows, in red flannel shirts and breeches, gazed on him with disbelief. This leader of the mounted party flew gallantly across the Murrumbidgee, throwing splashes up into the brilliant dusk light. The other riders, though trying to keep up to him, were more reluctant to make the show of it which he had. As they came up the slope to the higher ground, we saw that the chief figure was accompanied by four convict constables in blue jackets and canvas pants, and a black trooper in a blue coat, his bare feet poking comfortably out of his stirrups.

  They drew up and tethered their horses to the stockyard rails, in which Hobbes and Long’s horse, Dingo, reacted to their arrival with as much bad grace and suspicion as did Long and I. The Napoleonic man had swung from his saddle with much vigour. Now, his boot leather squeaking and slapping, he marched with equal flourish towards our party.

  ‘Sir, sir,’ he cried out to me earnestly as he advanced. ‘Are you aware of the new Land Occupation Act?’ Long and I smiled at each other. What a conversationalist! Long’s glance pronounced.

  ‘May I present myself, Captain Richard Peske, with a final “e”. I am newly appointed Land Commissioner for this district under the Act.’

  I felt uneasy at once, but Long and I fraternally maintained our indolent bush postures. ‘I was not sure we had the honour to possess a Land Commissioner,’ I said.

  He strained for augustness behind his lightly freckled cheeks. ‘Indeed you didn’t, sir. I am the first one appointed to this south-west region below Braidwood. Superlative country, count myself very fortunate, I do. Now, sir, I do possess your name, but I confess it is in my journal in the saddlebag and it has slipped my mind. It is painful for me to tell you, sir, that your occupation of this country is illicit, and that you must abandon this area. It may be that your flocks are forfeit – I shall have to consult the Chief Superintendent on that matter.’

  Surrounded by my huge acreage I did not at once feel panic. I told him he could not expect me to take him seriously.

  ‘That is a common response,’ he admitted. ‘But I think that if you consult the new Act, you will find that I possess authorities only slightly less – in these matters – than a Roman emperor.’

  ‘You can be sure I’ll consult the Act. I also have powerful partners.’

  ‘Well …’ he whacked his fine moleskin trousers with the pair of leather gloves he had taken off while speaking, ‘partners don’t signify in this business. If you ride south from here in the direction of the Port Phillip Pass, you will come to a sharp little pass named by that Polish gentleman Lhotsky as Dainer’s Gap. Do you happen ever to have been there?’

  I had visited it looking for the Moth people after Shegog’s murder. ‘I have been that far once or twice,’ I said.

  ‘Well, we have been up there and are coming from there now. We find, as Mr Treloar told us, there is a native cairn on one side and two trees blazed by him six months before you ever visited this place.’

  ‘Ah, that’s where Mr Treloar has been. For I have never sighted him. However, from what I’ve heard he was
pleased to have me to settle this area, since he himself could obviously not afford to stock this tableland.’

  ‘He has not said that to me,’ said Captain Peske, cool in a blithe sort of way. ‘He has appealed to me to give him a licence over this area, and I have no reason, on the grounds of the marks he has made to the south, to deny it. He is rather chagrined, I have to say, at the small number of cattle you returned to him after your muster.’

  ‘I was scrupulous, for God’s sake. I can show you my books.’

  How I protested! I had stocked this land, kept peace with the natives, kept my servants in good order.

  ‘Did anyone tell you to invest in this land?’ asked Peske. ‘I don’t mean Treloar’s questionable overseer. I mean anyone with any authority?’

  ‘I told you. Treloar. Not that he has any ultimate authority. The chief authority was the custom of the land beyond the limits. The divine vacancy of the place was the authorisation, and I stocked that vacancy.’

  Peske looked at me from under knotted brows, as if he were up to my tricks. ‘Sir, sir, sir. These matters have already been settled in most areas of the country, and only your distance from the seat of administration has allowed you such a good run. Now I can’t answer for what Mr Treloar might have said to you, but in any case, Mr Treloar is of an altered mind. And he has previously marked and blazed this particular quarter of the earth.’

  Long was staring steadily and with a murderous frown at the Land Commissioner. All I could do was go on arguing, somewhere between a bellow and a bleat. ‘One native cairn and two marked trees. You’ll try to expel me for one cairn and two damned trees? When I have taken a vacuum and given it substance?’

  ‘Ah, now you’re falling back on a principle more abstract than that provided for by the Land Occupation Act,’ he told me. ‘This land, though unoccupied, has always belonged to the Crown. You took it without permission …’

  ‘But if that’s true, it’s true of Treloar too. Yet Treloar has your blessing, and I am the one who is to be cast out!’

  Peske’s constables were growing bored and looking away at the blue mountains of evening. Did this ridiculous freckled gallant ride round routinely telling people they had lost their pasture and that their flocks were forfeit?

  ‘You might as well ride away,’ I assured him. ‘It will take greater force than you have at your disposal to push me off.’

  ‘Now you are talking like some Irish or Scots revolutionary. Wouldn’t you be ashamed to be taken away in chains to Braidwood?’

  ‘I would be shamed. I would also be howling angry.’

  ‘Your anger would not signify anything,’ said Captain Peske, again slapping the ham of his tight-trousered leg. ‘I am more than accustomed to anger. It is a product of my calling.’

  ‘I shall challenge you in the Lords.’

  ‘In London? That would be very expensive.’

  He looked so owl-wise that I began to laugh. This must be a joke put together by Charlie Batchelor. Maybe Charlie was visiting me, and had sent these fellows in costume ahead. And now he was concealed behind some tree, laughing!

  ‘We have in case all night to argue,’ I told the operatic captain in his uniform devised by no known army. The overarching law, like the curlews in the high trees, where the last light remained only for a moment, would need to sleep. ‘You and your men require shelter and refreshment. You can have that, but not my land.’

  Peske sounded both sympathetic and doubtful. ‘You would not, I trust, slaughter us in our blankets as the Campbells did the MacDonalds?’

  I looked levelly at him. ‘Come inside.’

  ‘Well,’ Peske said, ‘though I’m aware of being a nuisance to you, Mr Bettany, I find the concept of a rum-tea delightful, should you have rum. But I am reluctant in the grievous circumstances to impose.’

  Long made up a drum of tea and cooked damper, and entertained the constables outside while the black trooper started his own campfire in the lee of some boulders beyond the stockyards. It was Long’s way of ensuring I could have time alone with the ridiculous Peske, who sat with me at my sheet-bark table drinking tea laced with rum as politely as if he had not just told me to leave Nugan Ganway. He annoyed me further by feeling the freedom to inspect my small bookcase, which these days had come to accommodate such works as Wainwright’s Sheep Breeding, a bound volume of the Illustrated London News I had bought in Liverpool after selling my sheep, Macaulay’s Essays, the King James version of the Bible, Curry’s The Punic Wars, a work on Euclidean geometry, as well as the founding volume of my bush library, The Odes of Horace. He pulled this last out and began to leaf through it. He looked at the inscription inside the cover, and my father’s name.

  ‘Robert Bettany,’ he said. ‘But I knew a Mr Robert Bettany. My old tutor in Van Diemen’s Land. Excellent old chap, emancipated felon of some kind. Quite a burning zeal for dear old Horace.’

  ‘Your old tutor?’

  ‘Well, not so much mine. He taught boys called the Batchelors, and I went to stay with their family while my mother was ill.’

  He was a fellow for thunderous declarations. Having with utter certainty declared himself a Roman emperor, he now revealed himself as my father’s pupil.

  ‘That emancipated felon, as you call him, with the passion for Horace … that is my father. I remember you. Your mother …’

  ‘Yes, she died a year later in Hobart Town. Charitable creatures, the Batchelors. But your father …? Your father? Really?’

  I was not as worried any more, for I remembered the wide-eyed, tear-reddened child this usurper had been when I too was a small boy. His father had been the Crown Solicitor of Van Diemen’s Land, and, in the absence of a mother, it seemed young Peske had cleaved fast to the forces of authority, had somehow acquired the (you could be sure) colonial title of ‘Captain’ – his passion for military clothing indicated the amateur campaigner! – and become a Land Commissioner to serve the Land Occupation Act in New South Wales.

  ‘So my father taught you Horace.’ I now made my own declaration. ‘And your old friend Charlie Batchelor is my partner here on Nugan Ganway.’

  ‘But you are surely not little Bettany whom I knew?’ Peske asked. (He may of course have been thinking of my brother, Simon, but I would for the sake of my land claim be any little Bettany he chose.)

  ‘You are surely not the little Peske whom I knew?’ I countered.

  He whistled and shook his head. Then he said, as if to honour my father, ‘… dum loquimur, fugit invida aetas; carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero’ ‘While we speak, jealous time runs its way. Since you can have little faith in the morrow, seize the day!’

  He put the book reverently away and came and sat opposite me, meekly refilling his mug of tea and daring to spice it with rum.

  ‘And Charlie Batchelor himself is your partner?’

  ‘Absolutely. These are in large part his sheep you would confiscate! I wish you well with it, not least when the news gets back to Hobart.’

  He considered this bleakly for a while. ‘Oh my God this puts me in a pickle. Bettany, my God it does!’ He shook his head. ‘You have done pretty well here, you know.’

  ‘Not according to you.’

  He actually groaned. ‘It’s not really Treloar who wants you gone. He was conscripted by others, and I in turn was conscripted. Not as if I were someone’s lackey. I came here willingly on the report of an eminent gentleman.’

  ‘Finlay,’ I suggested.

  ‘Yes. It is on the demand of Mr Finlay of the county of Argyle that I am instructed to move against you in Treloar’s name. How is your father, by the way? I didn’t ask.’

  ‘My father’s well and practising law in Hobart. But Finlay wants me ejected?’

  ‘My dear friend, you have no idea what a scoundrel he makes you seem. I came out here determined to evict that scoundrel, that … well, I dare not use the words he used. What I find is no apparent scoundrel at all but a civilised chap who happens to be old Bettany’s son.’<
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  I swallowed a sick anger which had risen in me. ‘What is it Finlay tells you, and no doubt others, about me?’

  ‘Oh you sound a squalid man indeed in his mouth, dear young Bettany. That’s why I rode up here ready to give you the full force of all legal devices open to me. According to Finlay you are the leering son of a felon who tried to suppress the information of who you were, and who has poured your efforts into the seduction of his daughter as a means of acquiring some of his wealth. Because of your designs, he claims, he went to the trouble of sending his daughter to an academy in Switzerland!’

  I hurled my mug of tea, still hot, past Peske’s ear. It landed in the fire, where I was content to leave it sizzle and blacken as a proxy for Mr Finlay. I roared, ‘Let me say that where he has not chosen to confuse cause and effect, he is a liar, and I shall challenge anyone who stands for the concept that he is in any way an honest man.’

  Peske laughed silently, laughter which had more fear than hilarity in it. ‘Come, young Bettany. This is not some duelling place like Italy or Ireland.’

  ‘If it’s not,’ I told him, ‘it’s a bloody pity.’

  ‘Well,’ said Peske, by now well-fortified, ‘I will admit that calm regard for truth is often borne away when there is some chance of gain. If you ask me why Finlay would want your livestock confiscated, I can tell you that confiscated sheep go for knock-down prices, not at usual market rates. I don’t know, and I will deny I said it if you say I did, but perhaps the desire to pick up your Merinos cheaply further warped the picture Mr Finlay purports to have of you.’

  ‘I won’t beg, Mr Peske ––’

  ‘Captain. Mr Bettany. Captain, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘I won’t beg, Captain. But in a case of clear tyranny, whose servant you set out to be and seem now to have repented of, what can you do for me?’

  Peske thought for a time. ‘It is very true that during the short existence of Land Commissioners, my colleagues in the business have given us a repute for following an independent line and never giving anyone quite what they want. I suggest to you, Mr Bettany, that in the next few days you make some blazes on trees some forty miles south of here. I will use them as the basis of awarding this station to you. I will suggest to Mr Treloar that he is entitled by his blaze to stock the high land between Dainer’s Gap and the summit. I know he does not want to, his desire for that country being purely to accommodate Mr Finlay, but he will feel he is receiving some joy. You will have to pay license fees to cover Nugan Ganway, £10 for every twenty square miles – yes, you must, since that is the law, and no one’s malice. I shall leave your flocks untouched and adjudge you the legal leaseholder. I will hope that if ever I take up settling, no friend of Mr Finlay’s becomes my Land Commissioner.’