Mrs. M

by Luke Slattery

  As I continue playing I incline my head towards the midnight blue chair that I had placed here in expectation of his visit. He sits.

  ‘The Governor will be some time yet it seems,’ he says in a low vibrato as I play on.

  I feel myself swaying to the jaunty tune. He taps his feet — I note a pair of buckled shoes at the end of his nankeen trousers. Surely, these adornments tell me, the Governor is not his only patron.

  When I finish he rises, offering a flutter of light claps and a broad well-fed smile.

  ‘What would you most like to hear?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m not learned in music,’ he concedes. ‘It was not a feature of my upbringing. I am from a family of builders, not a brood of players. I very much like what I have just heard. Something with a measured spring in its step.’ He gives a little show to his words, throwing out his arms and shuffling his well-shod feet.

  ‘May I suggest, your step having been suitably sprung, that we enjoy a stroll? It is a beautiful day.’

  ‘I shall leave these designs then — your ideas for a new Government House and castellated stable. Shall I? Plans for the fort at Bennelong Point — they progress. But slowly. It is no easy thing to build an octagonal tower with ten embrasures and chambers for the twenty-four-pounders that will, at the same time, keep the powder dry so close to the shore.’ He takes in a deep breath and exhales noisily. ‘The more picturesque the structure — the less likely it will serve the purpose for which it has been designed.’

  ‘But this is already splendid news!’ I rub my hands together. ‘No need to rush things. Leave these completed designs on the corner of the desk in the study. If a servant stops you, say that I permit it. Macquarie will notice them when he comes in.’

  We take the path down to the harbourside fringe of the Domain. The first governors sculpted this botanical sanctuary out of dense bush and writhing ficus on the southeastern foreshore. Convict labour has been used to clear the gentle folds between two ridges of squat headlands raised above the harbour. I have made my own improvements: a bright green lawn; an ornamental lake like a melted coin; emus and kangaroos, black swans and lyrebirds; a botanical garden of native and introduced species.

  Together we stroll down the gentle slope towards Farm Cove. All around us the wattle is in bloom, like a scattering of sunlight given mass and form.

  We continue along the fringe of the harbour to which my predecessors gave the name Port Jackson. ‘Jackson,’ I offer in a peppery tone. ‘It has such a sweeping, unparticular ring to it, don’t you think? Why it could be at any corner of the Empire! Anywhere the Jack has been planted. How terribly lacking in romance. In imagination.’

  ‘Can you think of a better name?’

  ‘I could think of a hundred, though I might take Bungaree’s advice on the most appropriate. If, that is, his advice can be relied upon. It is so very hard to tell when they do not write their place names down. I suspect the very idea of a place is foreign to them. They tell stories about places and how they came to be, but I wonder sometimes if the stories are the places — if you follow.’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure I do.’

  He presses those broad lips of his into a half-smile. I did not see that superior smile once in the first few months of our acquaintance, when he was as tightly wound as an automaton. How much more dignified — even a little proud — he has become. Responsibility, for some, is a weight borne on the shoulders; for my Architect it is a pedestal upon which to stand.

  We are closing in on the botanical section of the Domain now and a banksia looms ahead.

  ‘Named after Joseph Banks.’ I gesture towards the shrub with bright, cylindrical yellow flowers like cobs of corn, brilliant against the blue of water and sky. I reach out to touch the spikes but draw back sharply at the sight of several bees whose suicidal instincts would doubtless be roused if I were to press ahead.

  ‘You know, Macquarie persists in his vision of the place as a moral laboratory,’ I say. ‘Of course it is that. But we must keep the memory of Banks alive. We are custodians of a rare and wonderful land. It is fantastical.’ I stride a few paces ahead and, turning to face him, walk backwards as he drives me on. ‘It is faery-like.’

  ‘Fantastical,’ he concurs. ‘And yet it grows more concrete, more material, with each passing month.’

  I slow for him to catch me and when he reaches my side we turn together, as if of one mind, to regard the residence perched on the rise and the town thrusting behind it like a child clamouring for attention.

  ‘I observe that Nature and art have combined here at your Domain,’ he says, ‘to form a most enchanting scene. It is a complete thing.’

  ‘Yes of course we must have Nature and art in company; and then, quite apart from that, we must give Nature her head; permit her to paint her own scenes.’

  ‘Your opinions are decidedly firm today,’ he says drily. ‘Not by any measure unsound, but so forcefully put. From where did this taste for the raw power in Nature come?’ he goes on, turning to me with a penetrating gaze. ‘I am sometimes bewildered by your enthusiasm for wild things.’

  He slows to a pause. We face one another on the path. If we were anywhere else but the Domain — the Governor doubtless studying us as we stroll along this path beside the shore — I would lace my arm through his in a spirit of warm friendship. ‘Perhaps it was a childhood in the Hebrides among wild folk,’ he continues. ‘You insist it was not a lonely upbringing. And yet I detect a keen — a most Romantic — instinct for solitude in those lone rides to the heights.’

  ‘My parents, good sir, were not in the least bit wild.’ I make a show of displeasure by stamping the path with my heel. ‘That is a common misperception about we Scots. We are, in fact, very hospitable. But yes, you are right, the taste for solitude — it is not a new thing.’

  Is that the reason I submitted to such a marriage, a marriage to an older man, a soldier, a ruler with a great cause? Were his long absences, and his self-absorption, a licence for my own?

  I start at the touch of his hand on my arm. He is leading me forward with decisive strides. ‘Emus,’ he says forcefully. ‘Almost upon us. Let us move on.’

  ‘But they are quite tame.’

  ‘Quite tame and quite insatiable. They will pursue us for hours to demand a morsel. If we fail to provide they will remove your bonnet and peck off our buttons … We will be strolling back to the residence in our drawers.’

  I laugh and give him a gentle slap on the arm. A firm arm.

  We soon reach the stone chair.

  With a deep — though slightly mocking — bow, he inclines his head. ‘It is your throne,’ he says. ‘I insist that you be the first to take a seat.’

  ‘If I am sovereign here, then I insist that we sit together.’

  I am wearing a long dress of fine white muslin, and the stone seat is cold and hard. He notes my discomfort. ‘Perhaps you could …’ He indicates my shawl, miming the action of rolling it into a cushion. I do as he suggests. ‘A little better,’ I say. We sit side by side facing the panorama and, at precisely the same moment, launch into conversation.

  ‘Please,’ he yields. ‘You were saying.’

  ‘No. But it was you … You were speculating on my past. I am intrigued. Do go on.’

  ‘Very well then,’ he says. ‘I see you clearly at, let us say, fifteen years of age, riding out into the hills, along the shore of some loch, copper curls flowing behind. But then … the talent for music? And the fondness for repartee?’

  I relate the story of my childhood and school days, my friendship with Miss Fullerton. I was, I confess, precocious in most things. I played the viola from an early age, though my father declared my first attempts a form of auditory torture that would have assisted his ancestors in their clan feuds by extracting confessions from enemies more readily than the rack. I had reached the brink of womanhood when my classmates still bore the frames of boys, and I could construct a Ciceronian argument before they had mastered their Latin declensio
ns.

  There were few volumes about the house and of those we did possess James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson was my preference. That book made its way into the home on the trail of Dr Johnson’s fame. He had travelled with Boswell to the Hebrides a few years before my birth. Father claimed to have met the great bear of Fleet Street at a local inn. ‘There is much wisdom in those verbal duels between Johnson and his opponents,’ I say. ‘And even more wit. Perhaps my immersion in those pages fostered a taste for raillery, not that it is a particularly admirable trait in a woman.’

  He has been listening raptly for the better part of this story. Towards the end there is a shift in his mood, his attention wavers and his gaze moves to his hands, which he places together in a prayer-like gesture between his knees. I wonder if he is listening.

  ‘Have you noticed,’ he says a little flatly, ‘that we do not speak of my past. Has my crime, and perhaps your discomfort in the presence of a felon — a reformed felon — made it an unseemly subject? I suppose it has.’

  I lay a feather-light touch upon his arm. ‘I think you mistake me. I would have inquired most certainly if I had ever felt you wanted it recalled. So many in this place desire only to forget. If you find yourself in an autobiographical mood, well, nothing would delight me more.’

  He casts around him uncertainly, as if he expects to find scouts standing behind the trees, lying behind the boulders along the shore. ‘In truth there is nothing much to recall,’ he says. ‘It is but a brief autobiography.’

  ‘A fragment should be easy to relate.’

  ‘I think, perhaps, that I wished to make a point rather than tell a tale. But,’ he swallows, ‘I will press on with it.’

  ‘Well then. Allez.’

  ‘At home in Bristol, my father a stonemason, and his father before him, I was neither of the first rank of masons nor the last. But my designs were admired by men of consequence. I was commissioned to build an assembly room in Clifton, three storeys high atop a basement, six Ionic columns wide, and crowned by a triangular pediment. My fortunes rose quickly in the heat of the war market and declined just as rapidly with the peace. While attempting to extricate myself from debt I made a grave error by appending a fictitious money order to a building contract and then forging the signature of a client who had, I am ashamed to say, served me well. Two hundred pounds: a sizeable enough sum to see off my troubles. And to arouse suspicion. Extremis was my only excuse; I was facing ruin. I was discovered, apprehended — arrested. You can imagine the rest.’ The Architect’s carriage is normally very erect, the plane between chin and neck almost horizontal. But as the tale goes on he slumps in stages until he is leaning forward on the stone seat, hands folded across his middle, eyes trained on a fallen leaf several feet away. He runs his hand through his hair, and begins to revive.

  ‘The Governor describes it as cheating, trickery, worse by far than the simple crime of theft. More like foolishness in my case, foolishness born of desperation.’ He breaks off, tosses his head back, and goes on in a lighter tone. ‘It is curious to consider that I might not have risen to any great eminence in Bristol. But at Sydney Cove I am charged with making a New World.’

  I inquire about his admiration for Palladio and he replies that all true artists require a master, a guide — a genius to follow in the years of apprenticeship, and in maturity surpass.

  ‘And you aim to surpass Palladio?’

  He gives a faint smile.

  ‘As I see it, a mere builder …’ he says in a halting voice, ‘a builder will erect a gabled roof to keep out the rain. A wall for the wind. A hearth. But there is something infinitely greater in an architect’s gift …’ He rises slowly and looks up through the leaves to the hard blue sky, searching for the words. ‘He forms …’

  ‘Go on. I am listening.’

  ‘He creates the places and spaces that nurture memory. And there has never been a great civilisation that has not remembered.’

  ‘Ah, but in this place,’ I suggest, ‘it is best to forget.’

  ‘Seriously now,’ he continues in the same earnest tone, but with more assurance as he moves from the abstract to the concrete. ‘We think the great builders of the past — Ramses, Pericles, Augustus, Justinian — strode forward boldly facing a golden future that was already theirs. But no!’ He raises a disputatious finger. ‘They went forward while glancing, every few steps, backward. Towards the future, with eyes on the past. I hope to do the same — to build a future with old Palladio watching over me. So profound were his investigations into the past — so deep his knowledge — that he was never its prisoner.’

  At the mention of that word ‘prisoner’ we lock eyes briefly.

  I drum my hands on my lap before rising to leave. ‘You, too, speak with passion today. But it is getting on.’ I bend to pick up my shawl. ‘And it is well that you reminded me of my husband, for he will be waiting, most probably pacing about the house. I should like to hear more of your story; what you have shared today is not so much an autobiography as an architectural treatise. Tell me, next time, a little more about yourself. If you do not tell me, I will have to resort,’ I flash him a smile, ‘to espionage.’

  ‘My work is my life,’ he says, rising and turning to me. ‘It is, I fear, the best of me.’

  ‘Well, no. I strongly disagree. The best of you is yet to come.’ The remark was not made lightly, nor offered as a flourish to finish the conversation — although it did have that effect. I would not have shared such bold schemes with him if I did not think him talented enough to realise them, did not believe in him.

  He is, I see, moved by this expression of faith. He steps towards me, leans close, looks into my eyes. His right hand begins to float up from his side. Is he about to straighten his coat? Or does he mean to caress my cheek? At the moment I suspect a gesture of tenderness, I pull away, turn anxiously to the residence. The spell is broken.

  On the way back he seems unsettled. He concentrates on his feet, runs his hand once more through his hair. When the path narrows and we are forced closer, I touch the back of his hand. No, I caress it. He cuts me a look of shock and pleasure. I smile in return.

  When we reach Government House I skip like a child up the stairs — one, two, three, four — and from the last step I fairly leap onto the verandah. The Architect trails a few steps behind. We are — both of us — laughing.

  Macquarie steps from the verandah’s shaded recess as if playing Hawkins’ part.

  ‘Do you mean to announce me to a waiting audience?’ I ask, surprised and defensive.

  He offers a feeble attempt at a smile, lips pressed tightly together. And his eyes: tight, defeated, the spirit gone from them.

  ‘I took the trouble,’ says the Architect, ‘to deposit some plans on the desk in your study. For your perusal.’

  ‘We shall consult on the morrow,’ is all Macquarie says. And turning, he walks along the verandah. It is my duty to follow him in this instant, without delay. And to endure an hour or so of marital frost followed by a silent evening meal. With luck, I will manage to coax him into a better humour by bedtime.

  We are all learning from each other. There are things, though, that we cannot — all three of us — enjoy together. The Governor shares my bed. But I have begun to wonder if the Architect does not share my mind.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A good year later — long enough for work to begin on the castellated stables, a military hospital on the western rise, and the Gothic fort at Bennelong Point — I come to understand how truly fragile is our situation in the colony. I am midway through Boccherini’s ‘Cello Concerto in B Flat Major’ when Brody charges through the door, ignoring protocol. His face is flushed and his mouth dreadfully contorted. I set the instrument down as soon as I hear the ensign cry out that the Architect has been badly hurt, is barely, indeed, alive. I must come quickly. I must follow him out to my stone chair.

  Macquarie is at Parramatta, at least four hours away by carriage and two by riverboat. We cannot
wait for him. I abandon my violoncello, leaving the sheet music open at the ‘Adagio’, and dash across the creaking floorboards of the hallway. Stirring up a storm as I rush out the door with the ensign I cry to Mrs Ovens, who is walking solidly up the path, that there is no time to lose. As she spins past me she looks shocked and confused.

  We gallop towards the promontory on the Domain’s eastern fringe. Brody leads the way, thrashing his bay Arab, its sweaty flanks splashed with gold in the slanting late afternoon light. I follow on my spotted grey. Just before we reach the road leading to the harbour, Brody takes a tight turn and plunges into a forest that soon enfolds us. He has already dismounted — the Arab’s breath roars — when I draw up on my grey. The path is narrow. We tether the horses and dash forward on foot. I graze my hand on a broken branch, strike my foot on a rock, feel my dress catch on a spindly shrub to the side of the path. But I press on until we reach a clearing. There, ahead, is a native camp beside the shore of Woolloomooloo.

  We both run, in the company of the first native to approach us, towards a figure lying prone beneath a fig tree with a trunk like carved stone. There is a bed of palm leaf beneath him, and around everything hangs a pall of smoke.

  The Architect’s hair is matted. His face is turned sideways as if we have stumbled upon him in a deep slumber. The high colour in his cheek is the only evidence of a still beating heart, and even then I am not entirely certain. Smeared over his back is a dun-coloured poultice giving off a stench that recalls the Dromedary on a still sea. On the pale underside of his forearm is a meandering weal.

  A native woman rises from his side. She is extravagantly adorned with a necklace of shells and animal teeth that sways as she gets to her feet. In her massed hair she wears a tiara of small white bones. My eye is drawn momentarily to her skin daubed red, ochre and white. It’s then that I kneel to inspect the figure before me. There is a pulse.