by Ed Hillyer
No limits, indeed – Sarah looked towards the window.
‘Nature…’ he said, drifting slightly ‘…is itself but “the Veil and mysterious Garment of the Unseen”.’
Lambert operated at the very edge of her understanding.
His head lay back on his bank of pillows.
‘“The light of the body is the eye”,’ he quoted, Biblical verse. ‘“If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”’ His voice, faltering slightly, turned husky. ‘“But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness…how great is that darkness.”’
Emerging from his introspection, Lambert studied Sarah in hers: he wondered from where she had received her recent ideas. ‘“BEWARE,”’ he said, so loudly that she jumped, ‘“lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men…and not after Christ.”’
Once more teacher and guide, he fixed her with his concentrated eye. She scowled, ever so slightly.
‘The idea,’ he said, ‘is the basis for knowledge. Man makes what he will of his own existence…cant, merely, should he forget that all of existence we owe to God. The tailor makes the man.’
Lambert relished the discovery that he could argue theology with his own daughter, yet knew nothing of equal say: he was able to look at her and not see the years of opportunity wasted.
‘Men,’ said Lambert, ‘civilised men, live their lives governed by a system of checks and balances…mindful of the afterlife, fully expectant of going on to their great reward, or an eternity of punishment. Is this to be the only qualification of our behaviour? The only result?
‘No. Obedience to the whole of the law is required. A physical obedience does not atone for moral sin, or vice…’
Lambert threatened to repeat the subtext of almost every sermon – original, or pastiche – ever delivered to an anxious congregation during his long life of service. But then the expected message turned on its head.
‘…vice versa… Moral obedience…will not atone for physical sin.’
His demeanour, dark before, grew dark indeed.
Though his children might be starving, a man should not steal so much as a loaf of bread: Lambert’s absolutism had always given Sarah pause. Here was some new dimension. She sat forward.
‘“The gravitation of sin to sorrow is as certain as that of the earth to the sun,”’ said Lambert. ‘Wherefore do you seek out the rewards and punishments of the next life? Those rewards and punishments,’ his gravelly voice turned barely audible, ‘are here.’
Inexpressible agonies worked his face.
‘When we suffer,’ he said, through wrecked lips, ‘God is often silent… I do not take that to mean…he is absent. Deny the power of the Unseen…and you may as well go mad.’
Lambert turned to her, eyes welling.
‘I do fear…’ he gasped. ‘I do…’
He is Kertameru, ‘first-born’ – as a first child, and boy child, no more than numerically distinct. With the death of his mother, even before the disappearance of his father, he becomes Parnko. In whispers around the campfires, thinking him no longer awake, the others call him ‘the son of gunfire’.
Somewhere in between his birth name and the name after death, another name belonged to his childhood – a name given by his parents, and taken from their natural surroundings – but Brippoki no longer remembers it.
He buries the bones and other remnants of his meals, and throws earth over the ashes of his last campfire.
To the north-northeast is a bank of cloud massive as Gariwerd – a mountain range, piled high, and just as solid-seeming. Brippoki thinks of his former home, Kantillytja warara, become the empty lands where he once walked.
The fourth stage of his life, as with the third, has been marred. The fifth, that of bourka – full man, or elder – can only be attained with the wisdom of grey hair. As a full man he should take the name of that particular place he belongs to, belonging to him.
Brippoki knows now that this will never come to pass.
A man’s goobong is his family crest or totem, adopted from some aspect of Creation, be it animal, vegetable, or mineral. Without a mother, his father missing, he is ignorant of his very root – his goobong.
As dusk falls, the birds swoop and circle overhead, though their waterhole has for the moment dried to dust. Brippoki is reminded of the constancy in nature, and of its importance. Pirpir, the wood duck, gunewarra, the black swan, otchout the cod – each cycle of the seasons, and when it is time to mate, they return to their birthplace, the ancestral feeding grounds, site of every former and every future congregation. They return there year on year even should the rivers cease to flow and the waterholes dry up, even until the last straw is withered and gone. The earth might be covered over, water poisoned, wood disguised and trees taken away, and still they would return, unto generations out of mind – living, in hope.
As ‘the one from Brippick Station’, he belongs to no land. He has no true name. No longer numbered boy or youth, nor may he yet be admitted a man. Brippoki is considered a foolish sort. His initiations are incomplete. His Dreaming is at odds. A solitary individual obliged to keep largely to himself, he is treated in much the same way as a doctor or holy man would be – except without any of the skills, and therefore none of the status. Whenever possible, it is appropriate that he eats and even sleeps at different times, separate from the others. Excluded from ceremony, he maintains a respectful distance. In this regard alone might he observe his sacred duties.
He has spent his entire adult life profoundly lost and alone.
Only now that he is come to London does Brippoki recognise his Dreaming. Here in this place, far outside of the World, he finally knows – or at least suspects – what his goobong is.
~
Sarah sat downstairs, away from Lambert. Following his bewildering turn, her continued presence only seemed to upset him. He threw her looks, often confused, as if unsure of who she was or else thinking she must hate him. She might have administered another sleeping draught, if it hadn’t smacked of knocking him out for the sake of her own peace of mind.
She wrung her hands, no longer sure of anything, herself least of all.
The clock in the hallway struck the hour of ten. With a stretch and a flex of her fingers Sarah laid the manuscript and her notebooks aside. Brippoki, apparently, was not coming – not this evening.
She could only throw herself into more work. She attended to various household chores in half-hearted fashion.
The Life wound down towards its close; there was only the matter of a few pages to go. Only an increased burning sensation behind her eyes, as well as faint deference to Brippoki, prevented her from seeing events through to their conclusion. In many ways she would prefer the story not to end, for that would probably mean, to her, the loss of both men. Druce, in the manuscript, had been staring death in the face so long that it was a wonder he was not dead already – although he was, of course.
No doom, however, should be accepted as inevitable, no evil ever ‘necessary’.
Nearly every commentator on the Australian Aborigine had spoken of their likely extinction: it was even said that, once an Aboriginal woman had given birth to a half-caste baby, their own seed lodged no more. The destruction of Brippoki’s people was undeniably a reality – but natural succession, the work of Providence? Pragmatical men of affairs might shrug their shoulders and turn their backs to the scene, but she was convinced: the way things were did not make them acceptable – and if that was naivety, then she clung to it fiercely. No law of nature dictated thus. No right in the least divine might excuse it. Man was dishonest if he summoned either in defence of his own actions. Should their extinction come to pass, it would be the work of his bloodied hand, no more and no less, and a stain on his conscience forever.
Sarah quietly cleaned out the grate in Lambert’s bedroom, ready to build a new fire, then made her way ba
ck down to the parlour, meaning to do the same.
Life had been simpler once, without the shame that knowledge brings.
Lambert could make of it what he cared to, but there must be more to religion, she felt, whatever its origins; more than keeping to a set of rules; more to appeasing God, or gods, than strict obedience. Saul once claimed to have never broken a single rule, and no one could dispute that as Paul he was the better man.
The Old Testament was filled with stories of angels and demons, possession and exorcism, spirits of good and evil – a fiery brand of religion appealing to men most especially in their weaknesses. They lived their lives and often died by the sayings and doings of supernatural forces. Should the imps and saints of any one particular belief demand sway over all others? Providence, surely, allowed for more than one single path to happiness and fulfilment. Any faith, strong in itself, should confidently withstand the existence of others.
All of heaven and the earth had been created in seven days. Was it really so much harder to credit the world sicked up by a serpent, or hopping frog?
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy; the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, were ascribed to the prophet Moses. Mosaic chronology of an entirely different order might also exist on the earth. The lead that separated differently coloured pieces of glass also served to bind them all together. If, instead, seeing them set against it, a religion sought to deny or crush all others, then that belief was weak and not worth subscribing to – for even as it saw that there were other possibilities, it made no allowances. Absolutism, moral or otherwise, set a limit to knowledge. Knowingly, it fostered ignorance.
And it was in ignorance that evil took its root.
Could a race of human beings appear so different as to make any possibility of connection painful, Sarah wondered, so that we simply needed to see them conquered in order to preserve our ideal of the civilised people we thought we were?
Only faith that was fragile sought challenge in every little thing. Only a questing faith might sow seeds of progress – truth sought not only in word, but also in action. Underestimating the capability of men like Brippoki arrested their development – in both concept and practice held them back, as surely as Adam did Eve.
Except God cursed knowledge withal.
Sarah stood for a while at the parlour window, unwilling, just yet, to fasten it shut.
She trembled to consider a universe filled with noumena that her God might not be the single answer to, after all.
CHAPTER LIII
Friday the 19th of June, 1868
THE FORCE OF SHADE
‘Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?’
~ John Milton, Paradise Lost
‘Father,’ said Sarah, ‘what do you remember of the painter John Downman?’
Lambert’s rheumy eyes, weary with sadness, circuited the room before settling on her. He resembled not a snail so much as a giant Galapagos turtle, or South Seas tortoise, flipped over onto its back.
‘Downman?’ he repeated.
Sarah suddenly wished that she had let him sleep: it was later than she thought.
‘Sir John,’ she said. ‘Sir John Downman.’
Lambert’s sad eyes rolled away again. He seemed to submerge within himself. Speaking at last, his voice gargled in his throat.
‘He liked to play…with toads,’ he said. ‘I was eight. Or nine. There…in the garden, at Went House…Swan Street…on the corner of Frog Lane.’
They both smiled, their smiles quite unalike.
‘Downman,’ said Lambert, ‘talked to the birds…and animals.’ Searching the ceiling, he enumerated a distant menagerie. ‘Tame toads, a favourite dove… two cats…and a pair of robins.’ He smiled some more. ‘They came to him when he called. He taught them…tricks.’
‘What else?’ she prompted. ‘What else do you remember? Do you know what happened to him, after that?’
She should not exhaust him with her enquiries. He seemed short of breath.
‘He very much enjoyed the company of the rich and famous,’ said Lambert – slow, but steady. ‘They were his favourite sitters. He was…a very good painter. Very popular…at one time.’
While resident in Town Malling, Downman had maintained rooms at No.188 Piccadilly. Even after the old man returned to London, he and young Lambert had maintained a lively correspondence, prior to his quitting the capital for good, in 1817.
‘Business…had greatly fallen off,’ said Lambert. ‘He was forced to retire.’
He gave Sarah a querulous look, no more than a glimmer, unsteady in his eye. Slowly and surely he shrank back inside his shell.
Sarah began to clear away the supper articles, piling them onto a tray.
~
I hen went To his majestys minetture drowor. & payd Him four pound for drawing mine. my frind lent me money. & as soon as my portrate Was down. my frind told me to take it to A man wome he kow to frame it.
Was the coincidence too fantastic? The possibility might not even have occurred to Sarah had Druce’s amanuensis not written ‘down’ for ‘done’. Done…by Downman? Fancy, Lambert would have said, finds the facts it wants. Of course she had no proof. Three doors down, on the corner of Charlotte-street, a man named Louis Hermann maintained premises as a picture dealer. She might enquire there, come daylight.
Sir John Downman had painted a great many royal portraits; Queen Charlotte, the Princess Royal and daughter of George III; Frederick the Great, King of Prussia; and those of other exalted persons such as Lord Nelson; Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire; and Sarah Kemble, the ‘Tragic Muse’. Among the great families, procuring a ‘Downman Head’ became a fashionable cult. Fashion, alas, was ever fickle. His heyday had been in the 1780s: if, in 1807, his favouritism had become so debased that he should portray the Larkin family, then by 1813 it feasibly might have encompassed the likes of Joseph Druce. That, or else Druce was the dupe of a street-sharp charlatan posing as the genuine article, ‘His Majesty’s miniature-drawer’.
In his dotage, poor old Sir John had ultimately failed in business – and where were his society friends then? Nor was his star alone in falling. Lambert’s mother, her own grandmama, had been the daughter of a baronet; yet, looking at them now, who could imagine it? So, too, the Twyttens of Royston Hall had shown no favours following the family’s tragic loss, the distaff side all but disowning them. How much further their fortunes could stand to diminish did not bear thinking about.
Woe unto them! for they have gone the way of Cain…clouds they are without water, carried about of winds…Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.
Sarah lay in her bed, in the dark, clutching Druce’s manuscript. Old age, ill fortune, recession and hard times, the themes within were all too close to home. A great net tightened about them, woven with the threads of immutable fate. Every night now she struggled to fall asleep; in fear not of black night, but of what new reality morning light might bring.
Her father dealt in moral absolutes. When he spoke of light, he evoked a perfect morality, and darkness equally perfect immorality. Each was a manifestation of consciousness made palpably real; right and wrong; good, versus evil.
Without the one, there could be no sense of the other. Pure light was no more visible than pure darkness; only the two combined, extremes meeting. The innate power of darkness was as the absence of light: it was darkness that defined the essential features of persons and landscape.
Lambert, in his fealty to the letter of the Word, held progress only ever made by shining light into darkness. Yet if, like the painter, one allowed for only light and shade co-dependent to be at all effective, then the world might be more clearly understood. There might be virtue in embracing the darkness.
How completely Druce’s miserable existence had come to align itself with his m
other’s curse, the mark of Cain indelibly inscribed on his face for all to see; cursed, as God cursed the serpent, to go upon his belly and eat clay. Sarah acknowledged him an unlucky individual, although often as not his troubles were duly his own. She also knew him as the vengeful type, his propensity for violence and bearing a grudge already noted, as well as the savagery of his temper. Often, when repeating his wrathful oaths, she found the incandescence of his rage – so ably communicated across time, through space – hard to resist.
The vivacity of his low character kept getting the better of him – and of her. Light, and leading; what, after all, was the worth of a stained glass reputation? Without the black in between, one might never make the distinction.
‘Your goodness must have an edge to it,’ wrote Emerson, ‘else it is none.’
Druce’s Petition, dictated within the Life, appeared to be a draft in preparation: even perhaps as late as 1819 he had persisted in his desire to return to New Zealand. The Memoirs from 1810; his 1813 Memorial; the Petition; his Life itself – he reinvented his story the entire time in that same forlorn hope.
Druce’s choice of alias invoked the inspirational Scotsman Robert the Bruce. He maybe saw something of himself in the sufferance of that legendary spider – never giving up, and never giving in, no matter how many times his efforts were in vain; his life’s work left, as he was, hanging in tatters. Ambition might ennoble, even if it extended no further than the capture of a fly.
‘George Bruce’ returned to England in the Porpoise. Sarah assumed that on board the same ship sailed Commodore Bligh, one of the very instruments of fate whose action had frustrated his earlier efforts to return to New Zealand. If ever Druce were predisposed to commit a murder, surely this then would have been it – that of the former Captain Bligh, of the Bounty.