Her heart bolted. This storm was bigger than a brickfielder. It had not just sucked the red dirt of the brickfields from the edge of the city into its lungs, it had taken in a whole desert of rust-red dirt from out of the west and now drowned the sky and the land in ochre. What Isobel saw when she looked back was a wall of dust taller than St Mary’s, advancing swiftly across Sydney Cove, obscuring the outline of the city and sweeping up over the domain. She pulled her shawl over her nose like the kerchief of a bushranger, if the illustrations in Bell’s Life were to be believed.
At all points of the compass the sky had turned orange, deepening in places to red, the sun shrunken to a shrivelled white pea floating in a blood soup. This was the Apocalypse, the End of days, more terrifying than the wave in Isobel’s dream. From inside this advancing wave of dust came a shrieking unlike anything she had ever heard.
All over Sydney people were hurriedly closing their shutters, drawing their drapes, pulling down their blinds, sealing their windows, locking their doors, scooping up their children and chooks and dogs, and retreating into their backrooms and cellars and basements as the red wave broke over them. It came down on the city like an Old Testament plague, cloaking everything in an eerie silence of choked bells and gummed clocks. It brought the entire city, its busy traffic and bustling human assembly, to a standstill.
There was no escaping the insidious invasion of dust. It poured like smoke under doors, down chimneys, through gaps and crannies, to smear every surface with a lurid powder. Even when the wind passed and its tormented voice died away the dust continued to settle, blossoming like mould on plates and glasses, tablecloths and mantelpieces.
Isobel was caught out in the middle of the street still ten yards from anywhere she could shelter. The shadow of the enormous rolling cloud fell over her. If she did not get inside soon, she would have the dust shoved into her ears, eyes, nose and throat. It was a choice of the nearest cottage or the pub. And then she saw her only salvation. The coach. There was no luggage on the roof, the horse was hobbled, the brakes were locked, the canvas blinds were down and securely tied. Was there a remote chance a door had been left unlocked?
Isobel staggered the last few yards to the coach’s step and grabbed the door handle. She had never travelled on one of these new coaches, which were beginning to take over all the Royal Mail routes in New South Wales. Oh, sweet deliverance! The door opened and she tumbled inside just as the dust storm struck. She slammed the door behind her and fell back against the wooden seat. She was safe. Outside, the full-throated scream of the wind was deafening and the blood-red darkness of the great cloud enveloped the coach.
She startled when there came a banging on the coach door on the opposite side. Whoever wanted access was tugging desperately on the handle. This door was locked. She could hear a voice shouting, its message muffled in the blast. dear God! She could not in good conscience leave a wretched fellow creature outside in this!
She pulled back the bolt. A figure in an oilskin jacket and wide-brimmed hat pulled down low over its face clambered into the carriage with her. Her heart raced at her own act of daring. The stranger was unmistakeably male. She had now allowed this unknown man into this confined space with her, a young woman alone. She prayed that nobody had seen them both enter the coach. It seemed unlikely in the circumstances.
‘Thank the Lord,’ exclaimed the stranger in a voice oddly familiar. And then the man removed his hat to reveal none other than her Charles. He looked at her with undisguised shock and delight. ‘So you are my saviour! Of all the people in this city, it should be you!’
They embraced and kissed and fell about in peals of laughter at this extraordinary circumstance of their meeting. All about them the storm raged, rocking the carriage as if it was a small ship buffeted in a gale. They could hear the nervous whinnying and snorting of the hobbled horse and the stamping of its feet. The canvas blinds rattled loudly in the window frames but miraculously admitted little dust as they were tightly tied.
‘This is providence, my love,’ said the artist, holding his soon-to-be fiancée in his arms. ‘I have been down by the wharf for some time, sketching. And then I saw the storm coming. The sheds were all locked and this was my only route of escape. I was too slow to make the Rose and Crown so in sheer desperation I decided to try the coach!’
Charles’s eyes sparkled with a fierce ardour as he looked at her. His face was lightly tanned by the sun and his hair gleamed gold in the strange burnished light of the storm. There was something different about him, thought Isobel, something magnificent but also a little intimidating. He smelled of the warm sun, and the salt of the harbour, and the tar of the charcoal under his fingernails. And a rich fume on his breath.
‘Have you been drinking?’ she asked, trying not to make it sound like an accusation, even though clearly it was.
‘Not drinking, my love. Just a small dram of something over at the Rose and Crown. To be social, you know? Look, see what I have been drawing.’ With the impatient enthusiasm that endeared Charles to her, he pulled his sketchbook out from under his oilskin and flicked through its pages. ‘There, look at these faces. Faces of honest toil, bone-deep weariness, everyday care. The faces of working people, Isobel, the people who really run this world, without whose labours we would all starve and go without.’
She looked at the rough faces on the page. They appeared to be labouring men of all kinds, young and old, lined and unlined, dark- and white-haired: sailors, carpenters, shipwrights, lumpers, cabmen, fishermen. Charles had captured the subtlety of each one’s character with such virtuoso ease, the merest stroke of his pen denoting a squint of ironic humour, a cynical twist to a mouth or a soulful tilt of a head. These portraits were no more than quick studies but they were masterful even so.
‘They are wonderful,’ said Isobel, genuinely impressed, though her thoughts were still preoccupied by Charles’s confession that he had been drinking in a workingman’s pub. Was this something he did often, another secret of her lover’s other life?
Charles beamed at her. ‘And look at this. See, you are never far from my thoughts.’
He turned the page and there was a portrait of Isobel. The frisson of recognising this beauty as herself had a profound effect. The sketch was exquisitely observed, a drawing you might dream of, neither falsely flattering nor sweetly cloying, but instead a frank, touching vision of Isobel that she immediately accepted as a true image. And at the same time, there was no use denying it, it was a work of worship.
Her heart was flooded with love, her body enflamed with passion. The roaring of the storm echoed the volume of her feelings, the unnerving, fiery light answered the fire in her veins, her skin, her loins. ‘do you love me, Charles? Tell me how much you do,’ she sighed.
Charles saw the light in her eyes catch fire, heard the note of yearning desire in her voice. They would have her father’s blessing in two months and their secret love would be trumpeted to the wide world and sanctified by a churchman. What shame was there in this?
Charles took her into his arms and kissed her.
The storm outside reached a new pitch of ferocity. To Isobel it sounded like the giant wave of her dreams, the grey-green wall of water that fell on Rosemount like a judgement from God and wiped away all its vanities and delusions, exposed all its secrets and pettiness.
‘Damn the way a lady should behave. And damn you!’ Anna had screamed at her aunt. Isobel felt the liberating power of her own rage, stoked by the ungrateful selfishness of her family, each one of them in their own way happy to abandon her: her mad sister, her dead brothers, her cruel sister, her distant father. This righteous anger burned brightly as did her righteous love and shameless desire for Charles. It released her, absolved her, impelled her. Charles was her future. Charles was her destiny. This was what she wanted. She was free of self-reproach and fear and guilt.
‘I love you,’ she sighed as he kissed her neck, her shoulders, her breasts. And as the blood-red storm rolled over them, as unst
oppable as their desire, with its hot light and urgent voice, Charles and Isobel turned a mail coach into their marriage bed.
Chapter 29
GRACE AND AUGUSTUS
NOVEMBER 1852 TO JANUARY 1853
A powerful alchemy of high emotion and physical ecstasy made Isobel invincible. She felt she had weathered the storm of these past few weeks, rising above her nadir of deepest misery. Isobel’s heart had not hardened against these distresses—she still shed tears for William and kept a watchful eye on Anna—but she felt safe from being dragged into an abyss of despond. It was not hard to understand why. She was fortified by the power of young love, itself bold and indestructible. It was also, Isobel told herself, her first real love. Any traces of her infatuation with Ralph Tranter were all but forgotten. There was no one to warn her about the arrogance of such volatile young love that could not imagine its own end. For now, at least, Isobel was possessed by that most potent of loves: a secret love, known only to a conspiracy of two, hidden from the rude gaze of society, untouched by the world’s cynicism.
Isobel hungered for her lover more than ever. As a girl she had been told by her elderly art tutor, Mr Vasey, that her drawings from nature would ‘amplify the wonder of God’s creation’. While the study of botany was a suitable subject for an educated young woman, there was the awkward fact that Dr Linnaeus had classified all plants by the number and arrangement of their sexual organs. Books of ‘sexless’ botany for women were printed with bowdlerised illustrations and text but these were not the ones Isobel found in her father’s study, which acquainted her intimately with the sex lives of the plant world. But, of course, nothing had prepared her for hot-blooded mammalian sex: the savage coupling, the sweet terror, the rough pleasure, the animal urgency, the lustful abandon. Thankfully, Isobel’s body now had this forbidden knowledge imprinted in every cell, nerve, sinew and pore of her.
After the dust storm passed, she lay for a short while in Charles’s arms before they climbed down from the coach. They were dazed in the clear sunlight, reborn into new skins, a little awkward and self-conscious. People emerged from their refuges to make sure the city was still there, undamaged. Charles and Isobel strolled back along the street, peeling apart the space between them. At last they arrived outside Charles’s studio in a narrow terrace house above a grocer’s store. They lingered for a while, unsure how to return to their proper and separate spheres. Their eyes told all their longing and, with lovesick looks, they parted.
Her desire for her lover made her giddy with wanting. She fantasised risking disgrace all over again. If only she disguised herself, thought Isobel, she could go to his studio and nobody would know. In her fantasy, Isobel saw herself dressed as a young man again, hair tucked away beneath a cap, breasts and hips and waist concealed inside her dead brother’s clothes. Like Rosa Bonheur, she thought. How that would please her lover! She had endured and survived the catastrophe of social disgrace and it held no fears for her now. She was beyond caring; scar tissue had grown over that wound long ago. Without her lover, she barely knew herself or how to be in her own body. She would go mad without his touch.
To make matters worse, Charles told her he had to go away to Melbourne. He earnestly hoped she would forgive him his three weeks’ absence, a trip he had planned months ago. There was already talk of colonial exhibitions to be held in Sydney and Melbourne the year after next in preparation for a second international exhibition in Paris in 1855. Charles hoped to find out more about the Melbourne exhibition, for which a palatial glass-domed hall was to be built on William Street. He had also arranged for a painting trip to Ballarat and Bendigo. His old friend Samuel Thomas Gill was making his name and fortune in the gold-boom capital of Victoria with sketches of life on the goldfields. It was too good an opportunity to miss. Isobel was gracious about Charles’s plans, of course, though she also let him know his absence would grieve her.
As if to underline Isobel’s retreat into the life of a chaste maiden, Aunt Louisa had reconvened the fancywork circle for the New Year’s day charity bazaar. Isobel’s participation was presumed and she joined the weekly meetings of the Mesdames Cornwall, Burdekin, Thierry, Forbes, Herriott, Smart, Long and Drummond. On other days, Isobel sat by the fire with her aunt, her fingers aching with the effort of stitching and crocheting. The fire warmed her pained hands and exhausted body and stirred up memories of evenings at Rosemount with her mother and sisters, bent over needlework and making lighthearted chatter. Such memories were nostalgic cameos, ghosts of a remote and now lost past.
Life resettled into familiar and comforting rhythms at Faulconstone. Dr Finch’s pills temporarily quieted Anna’s outbursts and she behaved as if nothing untoward had occurred. Neither Anna nor Aunt Louisa was in any hurry to wake that sleeping dog. Anna returned to her music and the house awoke most mornings to the martial strains of Chopin’s ‘Heroic’ polonaise.
Three weeks after Isobel’s apotheosis in the fury of a dust storm, a card arrived from Villa Dordogne requesting the presence of Aunt Louisa and her two charges. Grace and Augustus had just received a letter from their father in London off the Chusan’s sister ship, Shanghai, and there was some important news they must share. And they also wished to show off the magnificent portrait, executed by none other than Mr Charles Probius himself, that now hung in pride of place above the drawing room’s Italian marble mantelpiece.
When they arrived that evening, Isobel could not help noticing how luminous Grace appeared. Her husband’s expression, habitually one of self-satisfaction, was even more beatific than usual. Aunt Louisa and the three sisters wore black in honour of William, of course, but their sombre mood was lightened a little by the prospect, ever hopeful, of good news. Why else would their hosts look so happy? Isobel was also delighted to see Mrs Palmer. A long period of ill health over the last few months had forced poor Mrs P. into a prolonged period of recuperation. Tonight she looked a little frailer than usual but in excellent spirits otherwise. She commiserated with Winnie’s daughters over the loss of William and wished she could have attended the memorial service.
The portrait of the married couple (complete with foxhounds couchant at their feet) was duly admired and then everyone was seated for dinner. All glasses were refreshed with wine and a first course was served of asparagus soup, fricandeau veal, lobster tails, fricasseed fowl, beef tongue in sauce piquante, and potatoes à la Maître d’Hôtel.
The absence of the Major at such family gatherings was keenly felt. He was still the keystone in the arch of the family’s stability without whose presence there was a vague but persistent unease, despite the natural authority and alacrity with which Grace had stepped into the role of materfamilias. She stood and asked for the company’s attention. ‘I have some important news to share with you all.’ She looked around the table with a regal air, as if about to deliver a message ex cathedra. ‘I am going to be a mother!’
‘Grace! Oh, Grace! That is such wonderful news!’ The company’s cries of delight were mingled with tears of joy.
Isobel leaned over and kissed her older sister and her brother-in-law. ‘I am so happy for you both. When is the baby due?’
‘Next April.’
Augustus’s moonface shone down on his guests with benign pride. ‘He will be called Ignatius if he is a boy and Olympia if she is a girl.’
‘We are still considering names,’ corrected Grace, a trifle cross at her husband’s unilateral announcement. ‘We have already begun planning the baptism and asking Dr Finch about a wet nurse. So much to think about!’
How like Grace to look on this newborn baby as a complex project to devote her energies to, thought Isobel. One could only hope that somewhere in the plans of these two proud parents there was room reserved for love.
Isobel was not the only one to register Anna’s pitiful look of shock as if she had been slapped in the face, her cheeks flushed and eyes fixed in a stare of utter panic. If Anna held any fragments of hope that Grace’s historic love for her would survive he
r marriage then these seemed to be now conclusively crushed by the prospect of her motherhood. Anna could not compete with a baby.
The second and third courses were served and the wineglasses recharged. It was Augustus’s turn to stand and deliver news to the gathering. ‘I think it is important I tell you something that I learned this week,’ he said, clutching his lapel with his right hand in a gesture Isobel was sure he adopted addressing a courtroom. ‘Through someone I know at my club, I have found out some of the contents of the commission’s report regarding the Major.’ He hastened to explain. ‘I have reason to believe that certain persons of high rank have been circulating a copy, though thankfully only with a few others.’
There was a ripple of disquiet around the table.
‘I assume you want me to share this information?’
‘Yes, yes, of course!’ came the chorus of replies, though everyone at the table dreaded hearing how the Major had been scrutinised like a dead butterfly pinned under the magnifying glass of a naturalist.
‘I shan’t go into all the details but the report’s findings were critical of several aspects of the Major’s conduct of his department: bad management of budgets, poor delegation of duties, arrogant treatment of inferiors, prioritising the surveying of roads and his general trigonometric survey over land claims by squatters.’
Isobel could feel the blood rising to her face. She hated to think of her father’s despair when he read this litany of faults. It would confirm all his worst fears.
Augustus continued. ‘The report also found fault with the Major’s methods and actual measurements for his general survey, questioning the accuracy of his baselines. There was divided opinion on this point as to how badly it affected the overall accuracy of his Nineteen Counties map.’ This went to the heart of the Major’s professional competence and would hurt him most of all. ‘The recommendations from the Governor are still pending.’
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