I knew at once he suspected some sort of collusion between Long and myself, but he was hard put to decide quite what it was.
He told me that since neither Long nor the native lad had battered Goldspink to death, it must have been one of Treloar’s stockmen. Did I believe that?
‘I was not present,’ I said, looking away. ‘But … yes.’
‘Now,’ he said, his eyes glittering in that alien, incisive way, ‘you pursued the native boy Felix all the way to Sydney. Did you think he was guilty?’
‘I think he was frightened he might be thought so. I think he was in a panic over the malign spirit of Goldspink too.’
‘When you searched for the boy, did you try to discover if he had stayed at any seamen’s inns or dormitories?’
‘I …’ It was the trouble with lawyers. They were cunning always, and we poor pilgrims only sometimes; we were dabblers at archness. ‘I had no need to.’
‘Well, I had my clerk inquire, and we discovered that a young Australian native boy who gave his name as Felix stayed at the Seaman’s Mission in George Street for three nights. One of the dormitory wardens told my clerk the boy was going to sea. There has been no other trace, and thus one presumes it is true.’
‘I hope he survives the adventure,’ I murmured.
‘But, sir, the point is that if people such as yourself and Long are concerned with protecting him, your concern should be diminished by knowing that he appears to be safe away. So there would be little need for Long to sacrifice himself, if that is what he is doing.’
I said nothing, and he leaned forward and murmured, ‘Think about it, Mr Bettany.’
I said, if Felix was at sea, I hoped he was well. But did he believe a boy of fourteen could have done such a murder? I said. ‘If Long says he did not do it, and Treloar’s stockmen say they did not do it, can it be proven either way?’
‘Perhaps not,’ Handler conceded. ‘Yet I do not know how strong a case of circumstance Mr Cladder, the Crown Prosecutor, might make.’
I was in anguish, but instead of twitching, I called for some tea and, while waiting for it, shook my head as if genuinely amused. I asked flatly but with a thin smile, ‘Am I to confess to this killing myself? Or that I know Felix to have done this, and to have helped him somehow to have escaped onto the ocean? Is that what is being suggested?’
I was hoping that cunning Handler would say, ‘No, no. No one would claim that!’ But he said nothing. His dark eyes lay on me, and his ear was cocked, as if he was open to just such a story as I had uttered.
At last he murmured, ‘Long is a deep fellow.’
Thus I was deftly persuaded to ask another question, ‘Could it be by any means suggested I had aided a witness, or perhaps a perpetrator, to escape?’ The man, after all, was counsel, for whom I was paying.
Handler said, ‘I am sure we could cast that story, if by any chance it happened to be true, in a way which stressed your honest motivation and innocence of the facts.’
‘There will be no need,’ I said.
It was the sole interview I had with Mr Handler before the hefty yet delicate-featured Justice Flense of the New South Wales Supreme Court opened the trial in the diminutive stone courthouse at Cooma Creek. I had left Bernard’s protection before dawn to climb into my phaeton and get to the court when I saw my father emerge in flannel shirt and pants and boots, all inexactly put on, from Long’s hut.
He stood by the side of the four-wheeler.
‘I have been speaking with your man O’Dallow,’ he said. ‘It seems your friend Long is determined to be hanged. So O’Dallow says.’
‘I fear it may be the case,’ I confessed.
‘I would like to observe this fellow, should he be hanged. It seems he is a true Stoic by nature, experience and conviction. Stoicism is, in the end, a religion of but one sacrament. Suicide!’
I was so disgusted I left without a word, and made that by now habitual journey to the town not sure with whom to be most angry – my cranky father, myself or Long. By nine o’clock in the courthouse, there was barely room for the spectators, who milled outside in the sun, most of whom had to wait with the witnesses waiting to be called. The bench, the jury (made up of townsmen and settlers from Braidwood, Michelago, Bredbo, as well as Cooma Creek), the counsel, and Long in the dock, took up two-thirds of the available space. Treloar, with his determined, grim demeanour, seemed to take up at least a tenth of the courtroom – he was not an abnormally large man, but he had an abnormally large fixity of purpose. I nodded to him like a man with nothing to be afraid of, as we stood for the entry to court of the judge. Treloar frowned intractably and bobbed his head curtly at me.
When Long was brought in, chained as on the day I spoke to him, and placed in the wooden dock, I could not for a time catch his eye. He stood while the murder charge was read, and to those who believed in his guilt he displayed a commanding indifference, supporting his right chained wrist with his left hand. Some seconds passed before he saw me. He nodded very economically, raised his hand a little and then extended his fingers and thumb, like a man calming someone else’s outburst. But then of course I understood: though he did not know how cravenly I would cling to silence, it could only be inferred that he was absolving me from confessions and gestures.
I was nonetheless in predictable torment. To save him despite his wishes – that was what a true man should do. He pleaded ‘Not guilty’, which meant that the law would descend on him all the more severely if he were found guilty.
I was the first witness called by Mr Cladder, the small, flinty Crown Prosecutor. I took the oath on the Old Testament, but no sooner was it uttered than it seemed to fly away out of the courtroom’s opened window, like a bird too elegant and flimsy to bear the hot breath of equivocators like me.
There is time for truth, I assured myself. I might confess to subterfuge in the midst of testimony, to save myself from perjury, an evil crime in man’s eye, a worse in God’s. I began by explaining the circumstances of the snow storm, and of how I returned to Goldspink’s hut to find Long in the process of burying Goldspink. Cladder asked me did I believe the remains were being rushed underground, and I told him not at all, that Long was doing the right thing in view of the fact that we needed to move on instanter to my brother Simon’s station. As it happened, Felix had fled the scene, and there were many of my stockmen who could tell the court what a desperate search we had for him.
Mr Cladder asked me whether Long at Goldspink’s hut or Felix at the Reverend Paltinglass’s manse had said they had killed Goldspink. Neither of them, I said.
He said, ‘But wouldn’t it be the first thing you asked the boy?’
‘No,’ I said, in faked outrage. ‘The first thing I asked the boy was an inquiry after his health. Any other and he would have instantly fled.’
‘And,’ said Cladder, ‘he is what? Fourteen. You could not stop a fourteen-year-old boy from fleeing?’
‘I did not know he intended to flee,’ I said. ‘Having found him at last, I did not wish to do anything to make him take flight again.’
‘When you first met Long … did he suggest who might be responsible for the murder?’
I inhaled for a moment and pushed on into my perjury. The world was the same unsatisfactory place on the far side of my lie. The air did not alter. There was no immediate vengeance, as I told Mr Cladder that Long thought it was definitely some attack by one of Goldspink’s stockmen with a grievance.
‘You did not,’ said Cladder, ‘report the matter of the killing when you returned to your station here, Nugan Ganway? Why was this?’
‘I did not have time to report it either to the magistrate, Mr Bilson, or Mr Treloar. I intended to inform both in due course.’
‘In due course? How long is due course?’
I told him I had had long experience of reporting crimes to magistrates and being told that no action was possible. As it turned out, I had not been put to that trouble, since Treloar had been told by one of his stockmen w
ho galloped through from Treloar’s trans-alpine station, and Treloar had himself undertaken to pursue whomever was responsible.
Cladder now quizzed me on my chase of Felix, but I was inured, and survived that. Mr Justice Flense, humane-looking and of a scholarly beefiness, took serious notes of my prevarications, and continued to do so as Cladder sat and Mr Handler questioned me.
Handler asked me to affirm that I had intended to let the world know of Goldspink’s death.
I so affirmed.
Then I was asked to relate the escape of Felix from Mr Paltinglass, and what I told Handler and the Creator was a necessary and total misrepresentation. Handler reiterated that a native youth named Felix had stayed at the Seaman’s Mission in Sydney on certain nights. Could I swear to the court that I had not abetted him in this, or any other fugitive act? I assured the court I could, and did.
Next, Handler asked me for a summary of my relationship with Long. I praised his honesty, indeed his sense of honour, his competence and his loyalty. Then he asked me of my experience of Goldspink. I painted a less than complimentary picture of the man. But Cladder returned at the end of this process and asked me whether it was true that Goldspink had pointed out my run to me, my beloved station, and I had to admit he had.
Long nodded to me marginally as I left. If he still wanted my virtual silence, I had done nothing to thwart him. Yet he must have despised me in at least an abstract way for my evasions, for in saving Felix I was also saving myself. I left the stand a perjurer, but still hopeful that Long would be saved. I assured myself I would consider confessing to my perjury if by some obscene juridical shift he were found guilty.
I did not count on the number of witnesses Cladder had marshalled against Long. An interminable succession of Treloar’s Mount Bulwa stockmen came forward to testify that Long had frequently uttered threats against Goldspink’s life. They said he told them why, too. The absconder Rowan, before dying, had told Long in the Irish tongue that Goldspink was responsible for the death of Sister Catherine. As for Long’s capacity for inhuman rage, a border police sergeant was called who testified that he had seen Long point-blank shoot the wounded absconder, Rowan, as he lay dying.
Mr Treloar was called after the noon recess. He had gone to the trouble of having his servants exhume Goldspink’s body for transportation in a coffin to Cooma Creek, where Dr Alladair had inspected the skull. Cladder therefore called Dr Alladair, and asked him whether he thought the grievous damage inflicted on Goldspink could have been the work of a boy of no more than fourteen years. Alladair said that it was unlikely that Goldspink could have been overpowered by such a child. One blow could have been surreptitiously delivered, but Alladair believed it would not have brought instant unconsciousness and that against a boy, Goldspink would have made a successful riposte.
At the end of the day, I met Mr Handler and asked him what his assessment was. He thought the Crown case was even stronger than he had expected, but that it was largely an argument of circumstance and that he might be able to circumvent it.
‘By the way,’ he asked me, ‘have you seen Mr Barley?’
My heart clenched. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Mr Barley of Sydney?’
‘Cladder has brought him in by subpoena. He is at the Royal.’
I walked back to the hotel with Handler, my legs quaking and threatening to give way. What could I do, plead with him to back up my perjury? I had always imagined Barley’s visit as a scene of collegial joy, of his exclamations about the splendour of the country, not the squalor of its occupant.
Entering the Royal, I found Barley sitting in the lounge. ‘My dear old friend,’ he said. ‘Who is this scoundrel Cladder? But at least it gave me a pretext, eh? What is happening? Is my good fellow Long standing trial?’
It was a splendid act. I ate dinner with him, and the act continued. Or was it innocence? I could barely remember precisely what I had asked and told him that night in Sydney.
We slept, and I rose ready for judgement to descend on me. At ten o’clock, Cladder swore Barley in, and I sat and flinched.
‘Did Mr Bettany tell you why he travelled to Sydney almost immediately after returning to Nugan Ganway from the far side of the alps?’
‘He was distressed, looking for a runaway half-caste boy for whose education he paid as a Christian,’ said Barley, so brightly, so confident of being believed. ‘But since he was in Sydney he took the opportunity to visit me and discuss my new wool stores at Darling Harbour, and other matters.’
Cladder asked him what the other matters may have been.
‘Well, he seemed to think his ward might have hidden on one of ships in harbour. He asked me to write to a captain I knew, Parfitt, captain of Goulburn, asking him had he seen this lad.’
Was this a possible interpretation of my request for a letter to Captain Parfitt? It probably was, if one had an innocent belief in one’s friend, as Barley seemed to have.
I sat in a dream as Cladder asked his questions, but when he finished and Handler rose I realised that the greater peril would arise from him.
He asked whether Barley had received the impression that I wanted to be introduced to Parfitt to remove a potentially guilty ward from the scene.
‘Of course not,’ said Barley. ‘You have a very poor estimation of sort of man my friend Bettany is.’
And Barley was thanked, and left the stand, and I was left to wonder at how thoroughly lies could be reinforced out of the mouth of innocence.
That evening I promised Barley that he would make his first tour of Nugan Ganway the following day. When Handler was out of the room, he said, ‘I know that you reside with a convict woman. I raise the matter merely in case of your discomfort.’
‘That is not the least. My world has gone to hell, dear Barley. My mad father resides with me as well.’
We laughed together.
‘My eye,’ he said, ‘my eye will be for landscape.’
I thought that God should ensure that every scoundrel and liar had a friend like Barley.
Barley admired Nugan Ganway, took my arrangement with Bernard as a given, and admired that splendid woman too. My father’s confident assertion during the evening that Long was, besides himself, Nugan Ganway’s only Stoic, brought frowns of bewilderment to Barley’s brow.
Bernard set him up a comfortable bed on the ottoman, and when I came out early the following morning, he sat by the fire he had revived himself, with a blanket over his shoulders.
‘Did you sleep well?’ I asked him.
‘I was conscious of being far from home,’ he said. ‘And even in another age – with this talk of noble suicide by Long. What will happen to your father’s ideas if poor old Long is acquitted?’
I wanted to plead with him to bear with my chaotic household. But I realised that the day before he had told the Crown Prosecutor the truth as he knew it. He had simply begun from the innocent premise that in any dealings with him, I operated in terms of honour. His belief in me had coloured his testimony. Perhaps after a day at Nugan Ganway, he had begun to ask whether it should have.
So, as Long’s trial entered a third day, Barley and I rode from out-station to out-station, looked at flocks and boulders, climbed ridges to enable him to exclaim on the splendour of the country. But sometimes he would look at his watch. He meant to be well on his way back to Cooma Creek and Sydney. He did not choose to be baffled into insomnia again by my father, nor to have his faith in what he had thought of me, and in what he had said in court, undermined by another night under my roof.
While Barley and I rode, O’Dallow had kept post at the court, and as Barley went north by carriage, O’Dallow passed him, coming home on horseback to Maggie Tume. O’Dallow reported, ‘I don’t believe they can in any way find the poor fellow guilty, even with Treloar roaring and cheering in the Cladder’s ears.’
But I knew that O’Dallow’s one trial, years ago in some Irish County Assizes, had not necessarily equipped him to be an expert on justice in New South Wales.
The next day, not wanting to betray grief or relief I sent Presscart to town to wait out the verdict. He came back after dark. It had taken till mid-afternoon, but the jury had found Sean Long guilty, and Justice Flense condemned him to hang subject to an appeal to His Excellency the Governor of New South Wales.
PRIM HAD THE FAX NUMBERS OF HELENE and various other journalists and stringers of the Western press around Khartoum. Overnight she contacted them, notifying them of a demonstration she intended to make, telling them to assemble as if informally at ten o’clock that morning one block north of the Hotel Rimini. The fax suited her in Helene’s case, because she did not want to have to argue her intentions on the telephone.
In her mood of fiercely adhered-to purpose, she was equipped still to read and hear almost recreationally of Dimp’s ruin or redemption in Sydney. Dimp had recently given her a rare call. ‘So you are back from that Hessian place,’ she’d said. She had told Prim that in a few days Bren would return to Sydney from the United States. She had checked with his office. She was in a state of ‘a little tension’, knowing that Bren would walk into a house from which the hoarded art had been stripped. While he stood there shocked, she would have to call him and tell him flatly what she had done, and why.
Prim had wished her a slightly derisive good luck, and Dimp asked if anything was wrong. But Prim had not been able to bring herself to share the news of Sherif’s disappearance. She had been able to share it with Amnesty. Why not her own sister?
In a fax sent the next day, Dimp had confessed herself consoled that Hugo Ventriss was at work on the screenplay – or if he wasn’t, he bloody well should have been, after the advance he’d received. And then she passed on what she considered more solemn news. Drinking a glass of wine and in a fraught state, she had answered a knock on the door and, answering it, found Frank Benedetto. Dimp announced this as if it would greatly surprise Prim, which it did not.
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