The Opal Dragonfly

by Julian Leatherdale

  ‘You should be pleased,’ Alice teased back. ‘I exit the field and leave you to win over your Adonis of the barracks. I wish you the happiest of futures as an officer’s wife!’

  ‘He will fall in love with you, Grace,’ piped up Isobel, ‘surely. In that dress!’

  Alice and Grace fell into a fit of hysterics, their laughter so infectious, Isobel hiccupped with giggles. But whatever their hopes for potential suitors, tonight was not about the prospects of the Macleod girls.

  Tonight was all about Mama and Papa. The front windows of the upstairs rooms had been covered with sheets of semi-transparent waxed linen featuring paintings of the Macleod family crest and portraits of Sir Angus and Winifred, backlit by pyramids of candles. These painted illuminations glowed so brilliantly they appeared to float in the night-time darkness, eliciting exclamations of delight as the first guests emerged from their carriages.

  From the schoolroom window, Isobel watched with excitement as the great assembly arrived at Grangemouth. Coaches began queuing in the carriage loop outside the house at eight o’clock. The women descended first, chattering gaily and flocking up the portico steps like a bevy of swans with their long pale necks, snowy shoulders and puffed-up sleeves. The portico lamps shone on their braids and ringlets, adorned with hair combs, ribbons, tiaras, turbans and the bejewelled chains of ferronières. Behind them came the gentlemen, a clattering of currawongs, all silky black in high hats, frock coats and flapping cloaks, with a flash of white cravat at each throat. They swung their long black canes as playfully as dandies and doffed their hats to each other, the rumble of their voices sounding like far-off thunder.

  Isobel and Anna were permitted to join in the opening of the festivities down in the ballroom. In their prettiest dresses, they hurried to the mezzanine balcony overlooking the entrance hall. Isobel heard the regimental band strike up a Scotch reel and her feet twitched. Next year she had been promised dance classes with Mrs Acutt now that Monsieur Girard, the watch thief turned dance master, had retired from giving quadrille lessons at his academy in Castlereagh Street. All the daughters of Sydney’s best families were intent on perfecting the fiendishly difficult French dance.

  Tonight would be a marathon of quadrilles, reels, polkas and waltzes. By way of another gift, the Major had commissioned Mr Ellard of Hunter Street, renowned for his set of Sydney quadrilles (including Winnie’s favourite, the lively ‘La Woolloomooloo’). In honour of their anniversary, Ellard had composed a gay waltz titled ‘Winifred’s Pride’. The Major and his wife would lead the room to this tune later in the evening.

  Anna and Isobel found a corner of the ballroom to watch the glamorous crowd pour in. The room blazed with light from a multitude of lamps and candelabras as well as the chandeliers overhead. The carpet had been rolled back to reveal the room’s gleaming floorboards in the same way that the butler always removed the tablecloth and green baize for the dessert course to show off the French polish of the dining table. Frothy cascades of blossom tumbled from vases on tables and mantel, perfuming the ballroom. Servants passed through the throng bearing glasses of fizz. In the dining room next door, a supper awaited of lobster tails, cold cuts, jellies, soufflés and pastries, piled high in a glistening cornucopia.

  The hubbub subsided as a bugle call announced the arrival of the hosts. Isobel beamed with pride at her father, so handsome in his evening tail coat and linen cravat, with his magnificent whiskers and black hair framing his noble face. He wore a tartan sash proclaiming the colours of the Macleod clan, secured to his vest with his medal of knighthood. And Mama! What a vision of elegance and dignity was she, her hair in silver ringlets, her Belgian lace cap fringed with flowers and ribbons, and her face so composed and happy. Her evening gown was simplicity itself, cut from brocade of the palest lemon trimmed with rosettes of ice blue. And there, pinned proudly to her bosom and catching the light of every candle in the room, was Papa’s gift.

  The opal dragonfly.

  A muffled salute of gloved hands acknowledged Sir Angus and Winifred. But Isobel heard another sound: a sharp intake of breath and a low muttering that passed through the assembly like a rush of wind through grass. She looked up at the faces of the guests. Was it admiration she saw there or something else altogether? Shock, suspicion, jealousy? She was seven; what did she know about adults? But something was wrong. For a moment, she felt the room was filled with the stifling palpable heat of envy and the venomous glee of ill will.

  This impression faded away as the band struck up a cheerful jig. A group of guests, all smiles and pleasantries, pressed forward for a closer look at the brooch.

  ‘I have never seen anything to rival it!’ exclaimed Mrs Palmer, clutching Winnie’s arm in a spasm of affection. Mr Macleay, once the Colonial Secretary and Governor Darling’s favourite, approached, his gait slow and painful, both legs swollen with gout. Why had her father invited him? Isobel wondered. He did not, as far as she knew, count Mr Macleay as a friend.

  Never a handsome man, age had not dealt kindly with Mr Macleay. With Governor Darling recalled to England, he had been forced to resign his high office soon after Governor Bourke arrived. This sudden loss of salary had left him crushed by debt, most of it thanks to Rosemount. The talk in Sydney was that his eldest son, William, had bailed him out. A passionate naturalist (with an especial fondness for butterflies and moths), Mr Macleay possessed the largest private insect collection in the world. Forced to auction off his library of four thousand science books, he still clung desperately to his specimens.

  The Major had no reason to love or pity this man. Isobel knew that the Colonial Secretary had in fact thwarted her father on more than one occasion. It was well known that while the Major was away on his first expedition, Mr Macleay had stepped in behind his back and changed the Surveyor-General’s plans for a broad avenue from Sydney to Woolloomooloo Hill. Why? Because it had cut across a rich neighbour’s estate. The steep narrow road that replaced the Major’s was now cursed by coachmen and wagon drivers, whose blown horses staggered on its absurdly sharp ascent. The chance for a proper thoroughfare from Sydney Town to the east had been wasted. The Major never forgave Mr Macleay for his arrogant interference.

  Isobel watched the wretched old man sidle up to her parents. ‘Remarkable,’ he croaked, his eyes wet with tears at the sight of the dragonfly. ‘Truly remarkable.’

  ‘Why, thank you, sir. You are most kind,’ said Winnie, quite affected, if a little startled, at the depth of feeling in Mr Macleay’s voice and countenance.

  As the Major watched his old enemy bow his head to inspect the brooch, Isobel was shocked to see a look of the most repulsive gloating flash across her father’s face. did her mother not see it too? Or did she choose to ignore it out of love for Papa?

  When Isobel looked back on this night years later, it was as if the whole affair was itself a painted illumination, a tableau of the wealthy families of Woolloomooloo Hill bathed in the golden light of nostalgia. In the ennobling glow of candlelight, her parents had appeared so young and happy as they waltzed across the ballroom to the lilt of ‘Winifred’s Pride’.

  Isobel also saw something else clearly that night. The opal dragonfly was not just an innocent token of Papa’s love for Mama. It was, whether by accident or design, a jewelled dagger aimed at the heart of his old enemy: the favourite who had once had the ear of the Governor and almost cost the Major his career but was now a broken man, teetering on bankruptcy. This lavish brooch perfectly captured the stark contrast in these men’s fortunes. Isobel never forgot her father’s expression that evening, so cruel and triumphant. She hoped it was not true but, in that instant, it seemed to her that the Major had rehearsed this scene of Mr Macleay’s humiliation many times inside his head. Little could Isobel have suspected that her father already had plans in mind that would see the Macleods profit handsomely from Mr Macleay’s downfall.

  Later, Anna told Isobel all about Sir Walter Scott’s ‘opal curse’. Isobel in turn wondered if the real curse of
the opal was that its very existence brought out the basest impulses in people, giving free rein to their greed, envy and hate. Whether the dragonfly was cursed or not, Isobel recalled that night as one of the last times she ever saw her family truly carefree.

  For weeks after the Macleods’ anniversary ball, Isobel nervously anticipated the arrival of bad news. She knew it was silly but the thought caught her off guard at dinner, while sketching or saying her nightly prayers. For some reason she could not dismiss the image in her head of her father’s cruel face at the ball and the confronting glimpse it had given her into his soul. Her feelings of dread were confirmed barely two months later.

  Attending a regimental dinner at the Military Barracks in Wynyard Square, the Major enjoyed the company of the young officers, who hung on his every word about his time as a soldier with the Iron duke in Spain. Several rounds of port had followed dinner, which concluded around eleven o’clock when the Major shared a carriage with another guest up Brickfield Hill and along Campbell Street.

  As it was a perfect moonlit night, the Major alighted near the junction of Old South Head Road, farewelled his fellow-diner and set out on a leisurely walk home to Grangemouth. At the corner of the newly opened Darlinghurst Gaol, the Major passed the hangman’s hut near the prison’s eastern wall. Without warning, two footpads came out of the shadows, both thickset ruffians brandishing steely blue knives in the moonlight.

  ‘Let’s have yer crabshells, yak and reader, gov’nor. Or we’ll have to chiv ya proper.’

  With no pistol on his person and his head cloudy with alcohol, the Major reluctantly surrendered his boots, watch and wallet, all the while composing an angry letter to Governor Gipps about his police officers hiding inside their watch houses. When he finally reached home (thanks to the assistance of a nearby tavern owner) the Major told his family all about the ambush, volubly expressing his low opinion of convicts: ‘Scum, all of them, their hearts permanently closed to the promise of salvation!’

  Isobel was simply relieved her father had returned unscathed. It was only later that she reflected on this misfortune as confirmation of her fears, and the straw in the wind of the mighty hurricane to come.

  As the new year approached there were troubling signs for the colony’s ruling class. Every morning the Major studied the papers for omens (‘No need for worry, London will bail us out!’) like a haruspex examining the entrails of sheep. The long drought had already made land and livestock hard to sell. It was when wool prices tumbled on the London market that the horsemen of the economic apocalypse could be heard galloping over the horizon.

  The sacrifice of sheep soon became the order of the day: fat, healthy merinos, whose magnificent fleece once formed the bulk of exports to England, were now boiled down for tallow and candles. Those who had staked their fortunes on land speculation couldn’t sell up or repay their mortgages. Stockhorses worth hundreds of pounds were flogged for a few guineas. The British banks tightened their credit and then completely pulled the rug out from under the colonies, withdrawing all investments. Cash dried up, shops closed, jobs vanished and goods piled up on the wharves. When the Savings Bank of New South Wales and the Bank of Australia crashed two years later, panic gripped every household. The boom years were well and truly over.

  Nearly everyone on Woolloomooloo Hill had been granted or purchased land on the cheap and stocked it heavily to multiply their investments tenfold. For years they had grown fat and complacent on barrels of easy money. Now faced with falling markets and saddled with grand villas and country estates, they watched debt gnaw away at the foundations of their wealth like a giant swarm of white ants. Sir Angus sold off three parcels of land around Camden but, compared with the other residents of the Hill, he had few debts. When the Surveyor-General’s department ran out of money, many staff fled into private practice. Sir Angus took a pay cut and Winnie oversaw belt-tightening at Grangemouth.

  Down in Sydney Town, the mood grew ugly as the ranks of the poor and destitute swelled daily with as many as a third of the populace without employment. On several occasions the police watch houses were attacked and rioters rampaged through Sydney’s streets so that the Governor was forced to call out the garrison troops to restore order with the threat of rifles with fixed bayonets.

  One morning Sir Angus arrived at the sandstone fortress of the Surveyor-General’s Office as usual, its empty corridors echoing to the tap-tap-tap of his lonely footsteps. Soon after, from his office window he saw, to his astonishment, the spectacle of Governor Gipps himself riding down Macquarie Street at the head of a cordon of mounted police. Stepping into the street, the Major could hear an angry commotion arising from Queen’s Square opposite Hyde Park. It was here that he witnessed, to his even greater consternation, the Governor addressing a huge, boisterous throng gathered outside Hyde Park Barracks where the chanting of the convicts within was answered by the cheers of the crowd. Standing well back from this startling scene, the Major heard the Governor exhorting the citizenry to go home. There were catcalls and boos and someone shouted, ‘What should we go to our homes for? We have nothing to eat!’

  Then the voice of a lone Irishman, clinging to a lamppost to elevate himself above the crowd, rang out, ‘You have cheered well and mustered in large numbers! But why do you wear this yoke of oppression so meekly? Rise up! Rise up, I say, like our brothers and sisters in Canada! Throw off the shackles of servitude and the heavy hand of our British overlords!’ The crowd cheered lustily.

  The Major felt a cold sweat break out on his neck and looked over to the Governor, whose own face seemed white with fear. On his sudden command the uniformed troopers surged forward, batons and rifle-butts flying, and the Irish agitator was seized and dragged away. The Major later read how the fellow was kept clapped in irons on Cockatoo Island for a year. The Government preferred to blame Chartists and Irish terrorists for the people’s anger instead of starvation and despair.

  By this time, the four horsemen of debt, Ruin, Shame and Penury had come galloping up Woolloomooloo Hill. The owners of Tusculum, Goderich Lodge, Roslyn Hall and Waratah House auctioned off portions of their estates to stem the rising tide of debt but to no avail. One by one they began to sell their houses and move away. Poor Mr Macquoid, the sheriff of New South Wales, unable to bear the shame, took a pistol up to the attic of his villa and blew his brains out.

  Sir Angus’s old nemesis Mr Macleay was now encircled by creditors in New South Wales and London and sold off his rarest butterflies and most of his furniture. Finally his eldest son took on all his debts and moved into Rosemount Hall, auctioning off the family properties at Camden and a sizeable slice of the Rosemount estate, forty-four lots in all. Mr Macleay, his wife and daughters fled Sydney and sought refuge on their modest estate in the Hunter Valley.

  Over a period of three years, Isobel watched, with a heavy heart, the great exodus from Woolloomooloo Hill, family by family. She was dizzy with guilt as many of her childhood friends were forced from their homes and she read the resentment in their eyes as they packed up and left: why should the Macleods stay while the rest of us are driven out? From her nursery window she saw the long funereal processions of wagons and carts pass by with their melancholy cargo. Clocks, pianos, chiffoniers and sideboards, chests of silverware from India and porcelain from China, and crates crammed with books, vases, Waterford crystal, Spode tea sets and Worcester dinner services.

  And she waited and she prayed that her family might be saved from Judgement day.

  One evening, months later, as the Macleod women were sitting by the fire in the drawing room with their needlework in their laps, they heard a knock at the door. Richard poked his head around the frame. ‘Come quickly. Papa has something important to announce!’

  The whole family gathered in the breakfast room where a fire crackled merrily in the grate. It was here Papa liked to conduct the family’s morning and evening devotionals, where the women played cards and the gentlemen chess and backgammon, and Anna entertained them all with
Chopin polonaises on the Broadwood. This evening, the Major stood by the mantelpiece, stirring the fire with a poker as he waited for his family to settle into their usual seats. All eyes were fixed on him as he spoke, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘As you know, I designed this house with my own hands. I even carved the portico pillars myself. Everyone agrees it is a very fine house with a picturesque aspect and well-appointed gardens. However, I have been thinking for some time that our family could benefit from a change of situation.’ The Major paused and his smile grew wider. ‘I can now tell you that four days ago I made an offer on Rosemount Hall.’

  Isobel noticed her mother’s sly grin; she obviously knew something of these secret transactions. It was also clear that everyone else knew nothing and were astonished at the news, all talking at once with exclamations of surprise and disbelief. The Major motioned for them to sit down again and be silent. ‘As we all know, Mr Macleay’s eldest boy, William, has taken on all his father’s debts and become the sole occupant and master of Rosemount. I believe he did this out of filial devotion, to protect his father from his numerous creditors.’

  The Major took an envelope from the mantel and held it up for all to see. ‘I am delighted to inform you that this evening I received young Mr Macleay’s reply. He has gratefully accepted my offer and instructed his solicitors to draw up a contract of sale. As of next Friday, I will be the new owner of Rosemount Hall!’

  Joseph jumped up from his chair with a shout of ‘Hoorah!’ and, turning to his older brother William, whispered, ‘Well, at least now the house won’t be shut up like a tomb!’ Truth was that William Macleay had a reputation for being a miserly hermit, more interested in his shells and stuffed fish than in a good table and any civic duties or social obligations. Now Rosemount would be restored to its proper place as a beacon for civilised society and cultured conversation. Tears of happiness spilled from Winnie’s eyes. The Major shook hands with his sons and embraced his daughters. Everyone was overjoyed at the prospect of living in ‘the finest house in the colony’.