The Philosopher's Daughters

by Alison Booth

  ‘You must visit her,’ said Clive.

  Could he have any idea of the distance? Probably not, but he certainly had the ability of his class and sex to make decisions for others. Yet he had a point. There was nothing to stop her visiting Sarah now. Nothing to stop her travelling, nothing to stop her doing all those things she’d dreamed of doing and never thought might be possible.

  Nothing apart from those other commitments that had once given meaning to her life. The Women’s Franchise League. Charles, whom she knew was missing Father too. Aunt Charlotte and Violet. How could she tear herself from those connections and head off into the unknown? She didn’t have the courage to do that. Not now, not so soon after Father’s death. Yet she found herself saying, ‘Perhaps I shall visit her there. Such good advice.’ She said this to keep Clive happy, she told herself, that was all.

  Clive grinned back, delighted at being thought helpful. Then the four children, as if they had a collective mind, remembered their usual – and important – mission of having fun and flew off in pursuit of it, shrieking.

  * * *

  ‘My dear Harriet, I bumped into Mrs Next-Door just now in the street, and she says you’re going to the antipodes to see Sarah! Is it true?’ Aunt Charlotte asked breathlessly after Rose had shown her into the drawing room, where Harriet was sitting in front of the fire.

  ‘It was merely a passing thought. I haven’t made up my mind to do anything.’

  ‘What a marvellous adventure it would be, but really you simply mustn’t rush into anything too quickly so soon after poor James’ death! And without talking it over first with your family too.’

  Aunt Charlotte sat down in Father’s chair and fanned herself. Harriet didn’t need to ring for tea; Rose had anticipated her and appeared with a tray.

  ‘Are you going to marry Charles?’ Aunt Charlotte asked, when she’d drunk a cup of tea rather quickly. She picked up a napkin and fanned herself with it.

  ‘I don’t know. Probably not, but who can say? Anyway, he hasn’t asked me again.’

  ‘You could revive his proposal, that’s something we women know how to do. Or you could ask him yourself, after all you’re a liberated young woman.’ Aunt Charlotte laughed as she helped herself to a scone.

  ‘I’m not at all sure that I want marriage. You know that, Aunt. Surely you haven’t forgotten our conversation before Sarah married Henry.’

  ‘People do change, my dear. But why not go to the antipodes anyway? There’s nothing like a prolonged absence to help decide. You’d soon learn what was important after six months away. Charles is a good man.’

  ‘I know. People are always telling me that, although I’m quite capable of observing it for myself. You said I shouldn’t rush into anything and now, barely two minutes later, you’re talking about marriage and long voyages.’

  ‘I was simply thinking aloud. Or perhaps talking it through with you is a better description. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I am of the opinion that a sea voyage would be good for you. You’ve often said you’d like to see the world.’

  ‘There are my speaking commitments at the WFL.’

  ‘Lydia Buxton won’t mind finding a stand-in. There are plenty of others she can call on, you know. The number of supporters is growing all the time.’

  ‘Then there’s my painting.’

  ‘Dearest girl, you’re very talented but that’s simply an excuse. You can do that anywhere. I’m sure they have canvas and paints out there. You’re always talking about the light. Just think of what it would be like in New South Wales! And you could check up on Sarah first-hand, you girls have always been close. The Morgans are in Sydney too. You knew them very well when you were a child. They were almost like family.’

  ‘I’ll make up my own mind.’

  ‘I’m sure you will, my dear. But just remember I can help you with the house and anything else if you decide to let it out.’

  After Aunt Charlotte left, Harriet glanced around the drawing room. She loved this house but how shabby and unloved the furniture looked. And how vacant the room: it was lost without her father, as she was too.

  Through the window she could see the pale washed-out sky, bleached of all colour. How drab it all looked. She thought of Sarah’s letters, her descriptions of the light and the landscape, of a country she would love to see. Perhaps she should go to Sydney, for a year at most. She could reassure herself about how Sarah was faring.

  The next day she found out that there was one berth left on a steamer leaving Southampton in two weeks’ time. She booked it at once, before she had a chance to change her mind. That evening she wrote to Sarah and the following morning sent a telegram to Sarah and Henry advising them of when she would be arriving in Sydney.

  Her remaining days in London were frenetically busy, filled as they were with packing her trunks, sorting out her father’s library with Charles’ assistance, arranging to let the house, seeing the solicitor, making the myriad little arrangements necessary before a long absence from home.

  Her resolve was fragile though. The sight of Charles closing the last box of books moved her almost to tears. She wondered how she could leave behind this good and dear friend, and for such a long time. He’d always been a part of the family and now she was throwing that friendship away, as if it counted for nothing.

  His head was bent over the box, and amongst the smooth dark hair were several silver streaks that she’d never noticed before. Leaning towards him, her heart full of tenderness, she was about to touch his head when she thought better of it. It was too soon to commit, far too soon. And she wasn’t throwing away his friendship, she was simply testing it a little.

  Chapter 15

  ‘You’ve Never Managed a Cattle Station’

  Sarah was reading the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald when Henry returned to the breakfast table, twirling his hat around his forefinger.

  ‘You’re leaving early today, Henry.’

  ‘No, I’m simply ready early. There’s something I want to talk to you about. I forgot to mention it last night.’

  She put down the newspaper and offered him more tea.

  ‘When I was up in Queensland,’ Henry said, absent-mindedly placing his teacup down on her saucer with a loud rattle, ‘I heard that the manager of Dimbulah Downs is looking for someone to run the place for six months over the winter. I thought nothing of it at the time, but Arnott told me yesterday that they still haven’t got anyone to do it. Would you be interested in coming with me if I did it?’

  ‘You’ve never managed a cattle station.’ Surprise was Sarah’s dominant emotion, with apprehension a close second.

  ‘No, but I’ve had plenty of experience with mustering and droving.’

  ‘So you have, but perhaps you should tell me where Dimbulah Downs is.’

  ‘In the Northern Territory of South Australia.’

  ‘That’s a long way from here. You didn’t mention Dimbulah Downs in your letters from Queensland.’ While the name conjured up an image of a substantial stone dwelling set in lush green countryside and ringed with green hills, she suspected the reality would be different.

  ‘It wasn’t worth mentioning. I have no intention of going.’

  ‘Why did you bring it up then?’ She might have felt irritated with his lapse in logic if she wasn’t more worried by his restlessness.

  ‘I thought it might be a distraction for you. Something completely different.’

  She knew he was referring to her grief. She’d been touchy for several months and couldn’t settle to anything. Perhaps if she’d been able to attend her father’s funeral it would have been a little easier to accept that he’d gone. Again and again an image returned to her, of a stooped old man in a black greatcoat, standing with Harriet on the wharf the day she left England.

  She said, ‘A distract
ion before we go back to England, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. If we go back to England.’

  ‘I’m going back, Henry.’ Sarah wasn’t going to be tricked into agreeing to stay. She would leave Henry if she had to. At this thought, tears pricked her eyes. Since her father had died, she’d felt even closer to Henry. The trouble was that she couldn’t bear to be apart from him; his trip to Queensland had shown her that. He would be the ideal husband if only he would be more reasonable and do exactly what she wanted him to.

  ‘The conditions up there would be primitive,’ Henry said. ‘And the climate would be too harsh for you, even for six months.’

  She bristled at this. ‘I’m not some little weakling.’

  ‘I know. You’re as strong as an ox. Stronger sometimes.’

  ‘And anyway, you’re not going on your own.’

  ‘Of course I’m not going on my own. I’m sorry I mentioned it. I thought only that you needed taking out of yourself.’

  ‘Only?’ she said. ‘Do you mean to say that you yourself don’t want to go to Dimbulah Downs?’

  Henry’s laughter was misplaced, she felt. When he’d sobered up, she said, ‘How far is Dimbulah Downs from Port Darwin?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Maybe a week’s ride.’

  ‘A week’s ride!’

  ‘Through glorious country, so I’ve heard.’

  ‘And what would the manager’s wife have do?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing. The manager doesn’t have one. That’s why he wants to go south for six months. He’ll never find an unmarried woman up there.’

  She knew how this translated: harsh conditions and very little female company. She said, ‘Is Dimbulah Downs like Old Finch’s place in Queensland?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  He avoided her eyes and fiddled with his watch chain. She guessed he knew exactly what she was referring to. She said, ‘Mr Arnott must have told you about Old Finch.’

  ‘Perhaps he did.’ Henry opened his watch and examined its face, although she could see from the dining-room clock that he didn’t have to catch the tram for another fifteen minutes.

  ‘I overheard the Arnotts discussing him weeks ago, Henry. I was playing the piano at their house and they thought I couldn’t hear. Old Finch is a sunburnt chap with gingery hair, Mr Arnott said, who looks a bit like a Viking. There were at least twenty gingery children in the Aboriginal camp next to his shack, he said, and all of them under the age of eight. You can draw your own conclusions about that.’

  Henry looked embarrassed. ‘I’ve heard good reports about Dimbulah Downs. Apparently it’s a well-run station, with separate quarters for the stockmen and the manager, and a separate Aboriginal camp.’

  ‘You know a lot about it.’

  ‘I saw a plan,’ he said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The bloke in Queensland who told me about it drew it on the ground.’

  ‘You were thinking, even then, of going without me?’ She picked up the Hohner harmonica that was resting on the sideboard and blew into it several harsh chords.

  ‘Never, Sarah. Never without you. We are not going.’

  She swapped the harmonica for the newspaper and peered at its front page with unseeing eyes. When Henry said he was leaving for work, she did not look up. ‘Goodbye,’ she said coldly when he kissed the top of her head. ‘I’m so glad we’ve agreed that neither of us is going to Dimbulah Downs.’

  * * *

  The thing about not making peace before parting is that it hurts you as much as it hurts the other person, Sarah thought as she wandered around the garden in the late afternoon. Lunch with Mrs Arnott and some of her daughters hadn’t cheered her at all; she’d felt like an actress playing the role of the happy wife when she’d had no mind to.

  She watched the water lapping against the sandstone shelf below the garden. A horn blast from a steamer broke into her reverie; a sound that usually made her feel excited, evoking as it did the glories of travel, of seeing new places, of heading off over unknown waters. But today it made her feel melancholy.

  An hour before Henry was due home she began to wonder if she’d been too hasty. The whole point of their honeymoon in Australia had been to see a bit of the world and so far they’d seen very little of it apart from the colony of New South Wales. Perhaps six months at Dimbulah Downs in the Territory was an opportunity. There would be wonderful new scenery to see and people to meet. She thought of Father’s words the day she and Henry had sailed from England. Be cheerful, my dear. This is the beginning of a great adventure. You will see such wonderful things. He was right. She had seen such wonderful things. And she wanted to see more.

  Perhaps she and Henry should go to Dimbulah Downs. Maybe after six months in the Territory they could take a steamer to Singapore and then on to England. And then she could see dear Harriet again, and Aunt Charlotte too.

  She could certainly do with a diversion now, she thought; Henry had been right. Would this be a holiday though? Hard work, more likely, and the north of Australia was hot. Yet in winter it would be a dry heat and she loved the heat. She thought of the reports she’d read of wild blacks in the Kimberley, but she knew that the Territorian cattle industry was already established. She thought of what the grazier she’d met at Darling Harbour had said about the lawlessness of the north. It was a dangerous place, but he’d been referring to more than a decade ago. She thought of how she and Henry had travelled all the way from England but still she hadn’t been into the outback. And she really wanted to see it for herself before returning home.

  Dimbulah Downs was such an evocative name. Last week she had been with Mrs Morgan to an exhibition of photographs taken by the former Government Resident of the Northern Territory. The countryside had looked wild and exotic, the gorges dramatic, the Aboriginal faces full of character. At the prospect of seeing the place for herself she felt a squirm of excitement in her stomach.

  When Henry returned that evening she was waiting for him in the living room.

  ‘I think we should go,’ she said after they’d hugged and made up.

  ‘You mean go…?’

  ‘To Dimbulah Downs.’

  Like a slideshow displaying the gamut of emotions, his expression changed from disbelief to doubt to a joy that she found irresistible. He took her in his arms and whirled her around the room in a waltz, murmuring into her hair words that were hard to distinguish, though their meaning was clear enough. She was someone who could be counted on. She was the best friend a man could ever have. He was the luckiest man in the world to have her as his wife.

  ‘And I you,’ she whispered. ‘I’m lucky too.’

  Part IV

  Sydney and the Northern Territory of South Australia, 1893–1894

  Chapter 16

  Perhaps the Flaw Was in Herself

  Again and again Harriet scanned the faces of the crowds thronging the wharf at Darling Harbour, searching for Sarah and Henry. Again and again she saw no familiar face. Fingers of anxiety squeezed the life out of her excitement and beckoned in despair. Sarah was always so reliable. Something dreadful must have happened to her. But if it had, surely Henry would be here. Perhaps they were simply running late.

  The shadows lengthened and the air began to feel cool. Seagulls screeched overhead, a melancholy sound, and the water slapped and sucked at the massive timber piers supporting the wharf. Harriet sat on her cabin trunk and wondered what to do.

  Finally, the purser rescued her. He told her about a hotel nearby that he stayed at when in port, on the corner of Sussex and Market Streets, and arranged for the transfer of her luggage.

  The streets were crowded with horses and carts, horses and carriages, and everywhere the smell of wool from the nearby stores, overlaid with the odour of horse manure. But the hotel was clean and had a telephone in the lobby. Thankful
ly Mrs Morgan was at home when Harriet called her that evening, her voice choked with worry that a fit of coughing couldn’t dissolve. It was only after several attempts that she managed to explain who and where she was.

  ‘You’re in a hotel in town?’ Mrs Morgan said. ‘You don’t need to worry about Sarah, she’s fine. But it’s such a pity you missed her, and by only a few days too. She had no idea you were coming. You must come to stay with us first thing tomorrow.’

  Now, sitting in the Morgans’ drawing room in Mosman, Harriet watched kind Mrs Morgan pour her a cup of tea. ‘My dear Harriet, of course you must stay with us as long as you like, or at least until you decide what you want to do.’ Mrs Morgan was short, with dark curls that bobbed about when she talked, and a voice so deep and carrying that one couldn’t help but wonder where it came from. ‘We have a little apartment under the house that would be perfect for you. Don’t you agree, Percival?’

  ‘Yes, dear. Perfect.’ Professor Morgan was tall and so stooped that he appeared concave. His face looked vacant, perhaps because his attention was directed inwards to the realms of higher mathematics, a subject that he taught at Sydney University. Or maybe it was to the question of whether or not he should have a second piece of the lemon sponge cake, a large slice of which he now slid on to his plate.

  ‘I’m sure Sarah will telegraph as soon as she gets your message. The Victoria Hotel in Port Darwin will hold it for her until they arrive. It was fortunate that she and Henry told me they were going to stay there for a few days. But so very unfortunate that you missed them by such a short time. By the way, you did carefully word the telegram you sent them just now, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ It was not surprising that Mrs Morgan was worried about this. The telegram that Harriet had sent Sarah before leaving England had either not reached her in time or had arrived garbled. Or at least that was Mrs Morgan’s theory; it was the only plausible explanation for Sarah’s failure to mention it.

  ‘It’s so easy for these telegraph operators to get things wrong,’ Professor Morgan said around a mouthful of cake. ‘It happens all the time. Last week a friend told me how his instructions had been misinterpreted. It was his handwriting, you know. The operator couldn’t read it so the message was transmitted as some gibberish.’