The Opal Dragonfly

by Julian Leatherdale

  The Major then changed his clothes, packed his instruments and boarded a coach to the Blue Mountains where he would meet one of his assistant surveyors at the Gardner’s Inn at Blackheath. A road gang was conducting repairs on Victoria Pass and the Major wished to supervise the work personally. He arrived late that evening and camped up at the Pass with the foremen overnight. The following morning he arose early to inspect the labourers’ work.

  The Major had fond memories of this part of the Blue Mountains with its views to the plains beyond; it was here, as a young man, he had first encountered the wild country beyond Sydney Town and it had changed him. The truth was that the Major was never happier than when he was outdoors on horseback, his artificial horizon in his saddlebag, taking readings. He revelled in the subtle splendour of sky and bush; the smell of rain-soaked earth in the evenings or bush blossom in the heat; the epic majesty of red desert, grey-green scrub, wild grasses the colour of parchment, groves of white eucalypts, the ramparts of purple mountains. From habit, the Writer began to dream of words, the Artist to envisage shapes, translating this scenery into poetry and image. The Surveyor imagined something else again: an invisible grid laid across the countryside like a stencil, flattening it into abstraction to reveal its hidden patterns.

  All three—poet, artist, mapmaker—performed these mental labours without which no man could comprehend, own, use, understand or value this land. Maps, songs, diaries, poems, paintings, stories: Angus Macleod understood that the land did not exist without these mental labours. It had no meaning, no form, no framework, no context without Angus Macleod’s sketches and journals and maps. Of course, he acknowledged that God was the creator of this strange, unforgiving country and that he, Angus Macleod, was merely His instrument in discovering and mapping it. But at God’s behest, he had brought this land within the grasp of civilised men from the Governor and his Executive Council down to the farmer, the digger and the pastoralist who followed in his bullock tracks and trod his roads.

  His expeditions had revealed tens of thousands of acres of fertile grazing land to the south and north. They had been a mixed blessing when it came to expanding the map of human knowledge; some people said other explorers—Mr Sturt, Mr Oxley, Mr Hovell and Mr Hume—had done a better job in that regard. And it was true that these expeditions had come with a heavy personal cost. But that was all in the past, dead and buried. The roads he had surveyed and constructed would remain his proudest legacy, the Major told himself. These were the arteries that kept the colony alive, the channels that carried settlers and farmers, and the network of its commerce and communication, long after the coming of the railroad, the telegraph, and the river and coastal steamers.

  Just past mid-morning, with the frost barely thawed on the black ground in the shadows of the trees, Sir Angus felt so unwell he was persuaded to return to the inn at Blackheath. Here, a doctor was called to examine him. The Major was now struggling to breathe and his lips bubbled with phlegm speckled with blood. The doctor told him he had caught a chill, which was quickly turning to bronchial pneumonia or worse, and insisted he go back to Rosemount immediately and summon his own physician.

  Racked with violent coughs, the Major was ferried back home in a coach. He arrived just on dusk. Dr Finch was summoned straight away and battled to control his patient’s fever and stop the virulent spread of infection. But the Major’s lungs were drowning in a dirty froth of sputum and blood and every breath was a monumental effort. It was obvious that the Major had been sick for weeks. Weakened by his long sea voyage and the shock of the news on his homecoming, the Major’s spirits and body were failing fast.

  ‘Fetch the family,’ Dr Finch urged Grace. ‘He does not have long.’

  Isobel, Anna, Aunt Louisa, Grace and Augustus gathered about the dying man’s bed. Father was beyond their help and care. His mind rode out across light-bleached plains. He was finding his way to a bright new territory that no man had mapped. The pendulum, the engine, the heart of the colossus slowed and finally stopped.

  Isobel’s father died at a quarter to midnight.

  Chapter 31

  SHAME

  FEBRUARY 1853

  As she stood by his bed and looked down on her father’s face as shiny and white as wax, Isobel could see no future past the next second, minute, quarter hour. With her father gone, she mourned again for Richard, for William, for Winnie. Isobel was now an orphan, irrevocably, irreconcilably lost. She wanted to stand here, suspended forever between her girlhood, her youth, her happy days at Grangemouth and Rosemount, and her future, the vast unknown.

  She dared not move, breathe.

  She had risked everything the morning of the duel—her reputation, her peace of mind, her sisters’ and friends’ love—to save her father from the deadly bullet. And for what? So that, less than eighteen months later, he would be struck down by pneumonia? She remembered the words of the old soothsayer, the augury of the opal dragonfly: Everyone you love will be gone. Winnie, Richard, William and now Papa. Where would she ever find comfort? Aunt Louisa insisted on reading passages from In Memoriam:

  Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:

  Thou madest man, he knows not why,

  He thinks he was not made to die;

  And thou hast made him: thou art just.

  Yes, soon, soon, she would bow her head and acknowledge God’s merciful wisdom, His guiding hand in all things. But not now. Now she would rail against cruel Fate, her fists raised against an empty, senseless sky. She would howl out all her pain, drown in an endless flood of tears. She would be the swimmer, ducking her head under freezing black water, letting her body’s heat leach out, numbed by its icy chill.

  Grief would be her sole companion.

  Charles came to Faulconstone the following morning. As always, news travelled fast in the colony and he had already heard of the Major’s passing. He left his card with the butler and asked him to convey a message. ‘If neither of the ladies are fit to have company, I perfectly understand and will return whenever I can be of service.’

  It was a thoughtful gesture but unnecessary, as Isobel was eager to see Charles. Only he could tell her how the meeting with the Major had concluded. It was too late for her to hear the verdict from her father’s own lips.

  ‘Isobel! My darling! did your father tell you…?’ he asked as soon as he entered the room and rushed to embrace her.

  Isobel shook her head. ‘He was too ill. He said nothing.’

  ‘Oh cruel fate! That such deep sorrow should accompany such great joy! Your father is…was…such an honourable and sympathetic gentleman, it grieves me that I did not have the chance to know him better. To think that death has robbed me of so fine a father-in-law!’

  ‘So he…?’ Isobel’s eyes widened with wonder.

  ‘Yes, yes. He gave his consent!’ cried Charles. ‘We found so many matters of mutual interest to discuss, I believe we would have become the firmest of friends. While he was abroad, it appears your father corresponded with eminent colleagues here and in England who spoke well of me. I was able to furnish him with ample evidence of my financial bona fides. He also said he had examined his own conscience and could see no obstacle to our happy union.’

  ‘He was delirious when they brought him in,’ said Isobel, ‘and then he could barely speak at all. I do not know if he even knew we were there. How I wished I had been able to…’ She began to weep at recalling the agonies of the deathbed. Charles took her in his arms. ‘I cannot tell you how it gladdens my heart to know he approved!’ smiled Isobel bravely through her tears. ‘I knew he would see you for the fine man you are.’

  ‘Should we tell your aunt? If you wish to delay the announcement of our engagement, I will understand. Under the circumstances.’

  ‘No, no,’ cried Isobel. ‘I have waited so long already. We are already married in flesh and spirit, are we not? Let us sanctify our union as soon as we can.’

  ‘Very well, my love,’ said Charles, embracing her again. ‘Just as you wish.
’

  Aunt Louisa was summoned and told the astonishing news. She burst into tears and hugged them both. ‘I am so happy for you, Isobel, my dear. But so sad at the timing of this news. If only your father could have lived to see you wed, my dear niece!’

  ‘I hope I have your blessing as well, Mrs Blunt, now that you are Isobel’s legal guardian. I am willing to show you everything that I showed your brother.’

  ‘Mr Probius! Of course you have my blessing,’ smiled Aunt Louisa. ‘I have grown to admire and—if I may speak freely—very much enjoy your cultured and considerate company, sir. I believe you and my niece will make a very good match. Your reputation speaks volumes. And I have your word of honour as a gentleman as to the contents of your meeting with poor Angus. I have no doubt he embraced you warmly as a son-in-law.’

  And so plans were put in place to formally announce the engagement of Charles ‘Probius’ Ludiger and Miss Isobel Clara Macleod. Aunt Louisa would send out letters to all the family and a lunch would be hosted at Faulconstone or Rosemount in honour of the engagement. In about four months’ time, the banns would be posted once a respectable period of courtship had been concluded. The happy couple were free to see each other in daylight out of doors, unchaperoned. They could take walks in the garden or along a beach, attend parties and suppers, go for a ride or share a coach as long as their behaviour was decorous. They were even permitted such intimacies as a hand around the waist or a chaste kiss. In this way, all the formal protocols were duly observed and the world was none the wiser that Isobel and Charles had committed a sin in the eyes of God and lied to everyone in Isobel’s family and in society at large with no hint of shame.

  The Major’s funeral was held a week later at St James’ and a special notice was published in the Government Gazette: ‘The Governor, with a desire to shew every respect for the memory of Sir Major Angus Macleod, invites all the civil officers of the Government to attend the funeral. Sir Macleod will be buried with full military honours.’

  Through her veil of tears, Isobel watched ‘the great and the good’ file into the church with pious nods in the direction of the mourning family. They included His Excellency the Governor, of course, and members of the Legislative Council as well as Mr Perry, the deputy surveyor-general (who would probably take her father’s place at least for now), and the heads of other departments. She tried to quell the bitterness that rose in her heart at the thought that some of these men had been her father’s enemies, had spread vile gossip behind his back, had written the report intended to wreck his career, had destroyed his self-worth and his health. And here they sat in their sanctimonious smugness to pay tribute.

  Among the Major’s papers, Grace found a poem that he had apparently penned in the days since his return. He had entitled it ‘Farewell’, presumably to be published once his retirement was forced upon him by the Government’s unfavourable report; it seemed that he had made the decision to leave Sydney forever and return to England. The poem made references to Victoria Pass, named for Her Majesty, and built with the sweat and blood of ‘the banished’ convicts, as well as to his expeditions into the hinterland (his ‘centaurs’) and the deaths of both his sons. What had been intended as valedictory verses had now become the Major’s own epitaph. Grace stood in the lectern and read it to the assembled elite of the colony, her face proud and serene:

  Deep, deep in thy rocks, O Australia,

  I carved out my sovereign’s name;

  By the side of the banished but faithful,

  I climbed up the steep hill of fame.

  Farewell to thy deserts, Australia,

  My centaurs who swept o’er them are gone;

  Their bones bleach on hill and in valley,

  Their dust in the hot wind is blown.

  Cold under the grasses of Camden

  And deep beneath wild ocean’s waves,

  My two sons whilst serving Australia,

  Have both found untimely graves.

  With bittersweet memories, I leave you

  Source of pride and of pain o’er the years

  Yet I leave thee in sorrow, Australia,

  Thou field of my toils and my tears.

  As the poem was read, Isobel studied the faces of the men around her. Was there any shame in these hard faces, any regrets that they had hounded this fine man to his death? She could not tell. There was only one man she regarded with respect here. Her future husband.

  In November, Papa had joined the teeming thousands on the streets of London as Wellington’s funeral car passed by, his four nested coffins laid on a velvet pall, surmounted by heraldic escutcheons and drawn by twelve horses. Behind it came two mourning coaches followed by a cavalcade of British knights and aristocrats, and Wellington’s regiments and battalions, a procession that stretched so far along Pall Mall that it took over two hours to arrive at St Paul’s. As she stood in St James’ the morning of her father’s service, Isobel wondered what feelings had stirred in his breast to see the hero of his youth laid to rest and to contemplate the passing of his generation of war veterans. did he feel that his hour of courageous service had also marched on?

  The Major’s military honours were, of course, a more modest affair than the Iron duke’s, but executed with meticulous ceremony and solemnity nonetheless. His coffin was draped in a flag, his sword and hat placed upon the bier and his body borne on a gun carriage, accompanied by cavalry officers, to the church. Soldiers of the 11th Regiment fired a salute over the grave and the last post was played by a solitary bugler at the graveside to signify that the dead man’s duty was done and he could now rest in peace.

  A wake was held at Rosemount for family and friends. As Isobel passed through the crowd of sympathetic faces, wearing their kind smiles and bestowing their words of comfort, her mind was drawn back to a memorable evening when she was only six.

  She had stood with her sister Anna in the ballroom at Grangemouth and watched the glamorous assembly applaud her parents at their wedding anniversary ball. Her parents had looked so young and proud that night as they waltzed under the brilliance of the chandeliers. Isobel had later recalled the whole scene as if it was a painted illumination, a tableau bathed in the golden light of nostalgia: one of the last times her family had been truly carefree. She also recalled the shifty-eyed looks and low mutterings when her mother had appeared, defiantly wearing her ‘unlucky’ opal dragonfly brooch, and Mr Macleay’s mask of pathos when he beheld its bewitching beauty. Was this night the origin of all the evil that had followed? Was the opal really unlucky? Or had it merely served as a talisman, like a magnet to iron filings, to draw out the secrets of her family’s souls?

  She fingered her mother’s brooch, concealed beneath her mourning weeds. She had worn that same brooch to her mother’s funeral. And to her sister’s wedding. And now to her father’s funeral service. Would she ever be able to wear it openly, without shame or secrecy?

  Among the crowd of mourners, Isobel spotted a figure standing apart. It was a young man, his hair prematurely white. His crippled left arm dangled at his side with its hand stiffened into a claw, and his face seemed stricken by a permanent spasm of the left cheek below the blank marble of a blinded eye. He looked oddly familiar but she could not place him at first. And then, with a sudden shock, she realised it was her brother Joseph, so terribly altered! She had not seen him at the church service; it was possible he had chosen not to attend for fear of being recognised. She went to him.

  ‘My dearest Joseph, how good it is to see you again! I cannot find words to express my joy!’ cried Isobel, kissing him on his unaffected cheek. She felt his body flinch as if it pained him to be the subject of such intimacy. He studied her momentarily before replying.

  ‘You look well, dear sister,’ he murmured in a strained, formal tone. ‘I hear congratulations are in order. You are to be married. I must meet the lucky gentleman who is to have the honour.’

  It was not hard to guess why her brother looked so uncomfortable. His falling out with th
e Major was a matter of public record. To his own sisters he had confessed his bitterness, even going so far as to blame William’s death on the Major’s disappointment in all three of his sons. And yet here he was, presumably to join with his family in their grief if not to pay his respects to his father. Isobel’s heart was full of confused feelings: joy at seeing Joseph alive, distress at his physical and spiritual injuries, fear of his anger and dismay when he learned about the fate of Rosemount. Everything she wanted to say opened a door onto a painful topic and she struggled to speak her mind.

  ‘Yes, of course. I hope you will like him. do Grace and Anna know you are here?’

  ‘Yes. I wrote to Grace last week when I saw the death notice in the papers,’ said Joseph. ‘I understand there is to be a reading of the will later in the study.’

  Isobel was saddened to hear the sour note in her brother’s voice, and to observe the hardness in his face. Joseph had been the most thoughtful and quiet of her three brothers, often found in a secluded corner reading one of the Romantic poets or a volume of political philosophy by Thomas Paine, William Godwin or another of those radical ‘English Jacobins’ that his father despised. While Richard was the classics scholar and William the scientist, Joseph had been drawn to poetry and philosophy to imagine a more just world. Partly to please his father, he had undertaken the law but had grown disillusioned and turned to politics and journalism instead. Isobel had privately admired Joseph’s independent spirit and often wished she had his courage. Perhaps, after all, she did.