Above the Starry Frame

by Helen Townsend

  The banks of the stream were soggy and slippery from cow pats, but they picked their way along to the place where Eliza knew the strawberries grew.

  ‘This is what we’ve come for,’ she said and laid out her red kerchief and showed James how to choose the ripe strawberries.

  ‘This one tastes grand,’ said James. ‘Oh Aunt Eliza, we’ll have a feast tonight.’

  As she collected the strawberries in her kerchief she felt the coming load of helping Mother up the stairs to bed, then sitting with Father as he told her all the events of his day. These thoughts gave her a sudden loneliness.

  ‘I would not like to be all alone when I’m old,’ she said. She sounded sad, and she couldn’t stop the feeling, but she didn’t wish James to be sad, for she could remember when she was a child, not liking it when people spoke of their death and decay. And she was not old herself, twenty-six or about, which might be a little old for marrying, but only a little and still quite possible.

  ‘Look, James, there’s the summer moon. It’ll be large and golden later, a fine sight. We’ll come out and see it before we go to bed. That’ll be grand.’

  ‘It will.’ He drew closer to her. ‘I thought I might be alone when my mother died. But then, I came here with you.’

  ‘Ah James,’ she said. ‘I meself am glad you did.’

  ‘I bought that land opposite the railway station,’ William told Bridget some weeks later, as she was brushing her hair before bed. ‘And I arranged with Cuthbert for credit for the cost of building the hotel. “William Irwin’s Family and Commercial Provincial Hotel” it is to be called.’ His mind was full of fine bedrooms, snug stables, better than anything he’d ever had at the Star. This enterprise was a step forward in life.

  ‘Mightily impressed I am, Billy,’ Bridget said. She loved his sudden enthusiasms, his plunges into business. He had good instincts which were rarely wrong, on account of being backed up by columns of figures he jotted down in his black notebook and moved around in his head in a way she found quite remarkable. Of course gold mining was more difficult, the calculations being more chancy, but the profits he made there were generally bigger than his losses. ‘Of course,’ she went on, ‘you want to be thinking there’s more to a hotel than a fine sign across the front. You want to be thinking how to furnish the rooms and all, and maybe a garden outside the parlour. That’s a great refinement I heard of.’

  ‘We’ll see about a garden,’ he said. ‘I need to keep the costs in. I had to mortgage everything.’

  ‘I thought you hated to borrow.’

  ‘Cuthbert charges a cut-throat rate, it’s true,’ he said. ‘But even had I sold all my shares I’d still need to borrow. So I have mortgaged everything I own to build in a fine and fitting style.’

  Bridget held up the silver brush he had bought for her. ‘Did you mortgage this?’ she asked. ‘My silver brush?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘but I mortgaged little William Joseph, for he’s a very fine child and worth a great deal. And I mortgaged the port glasses in the bar and I mortgaged the dining room chairs that we saved from the Star, and the silver decanter bottle and the clock above the bar.’

  She laughed. ‘I’ll be most happy to have our own place again.’

  He didn’t tell her that Cuthbert really did have a surety on everything, right down to the kitchen carving knives. That worry, he thought, could lie with him.

  * * *

  16th Dec 1861

  Knockaleery

  Dear Brother, Sister and famely all,

  Your kind enqureys after my Mother I will never forget. She is no beter in health nor never will be, but still able to go about a little. The docter’s medicine woud kill her. Nothing but punch and wine & sweetes & syripes made up releves her.

  As for my father God favour him with good health. He bes up every moring at 5 o’clock & gets then all to work. He looks beter this Sumer then the last few years. I am shure if William had seen him at Major Richord’s funeral he woud be proud. His father look so well amongst the rest in rank; a man of 80 years of age. I think ther is none of sons will stand it soo well as he has done.

  This is our harvest time, but a very dull one, all wet. On 9th instant there was hurricane of wind destroyed our country. The oats is shaken and the flax all lifted up off the grass off intirely.

  I hope you are better off, than stuck in poor Ireland. But we have no reason to complane. We lives a deal beter than some of our neighbours.

  I was most glad to see Mrs Irwin likeness and litle Soney She is a most handsom nice woman and W J is such healthy fat looking boy. I hope the Lord will Make blessing of him to you. I often look at the likeness & so does mother. He is such fat strong litle boy. I think he is like yourself. We have them in a frame, covered with glass, the mother and son together.

  Be shure and write every two mounth to us. I think long for Mrs Irwins letters, but dont think that we want any present off you, for you done too much. Thank God we have plenty of everything Such as poor can afford.

  We join with kind love to you and Mrs and sonsy

  I remain affectionate

  to Death

  Eliza Irwin

  * * *

  The photographer, Mr Middleton, had many handsome photos in his windows, and Bridget knew many of the people in his pictures. She had strong views on the various poses and arrangements, and how well each of the families looked.

  ‘You see here,’ she said, ‘Mrs James has too much pattern on her dress, so it looks awkward. And Mr Malarchy, all in black, so his face looks dreadful pale.’

  ‘It seems a great expense and trouble to go to for a picture,’ said William, ‘although Mother will be pleased. And Lizey too. She loves to know about young Willy.’

  Mr Middleton opened the door and ushered them in. ‘The three of you?’ he asked. ‘A family portrait?’

  ‘A family portrait,’ said Bridget. They waited while Mr Middleton fussed with the scene, which seemed to William to be overcrowded with ferns and included a palm tree which would give his family in Ireland a false impression of Ballarat.

  ‘Seeing as it’s to send home, I was thinking just you and William Joseph,’ said William. ‘They know how I look.’

  The photographer put his head out from behind the curtain. ‘It costs no more to put you into the photograph, sir. Or I could do one of your lady wife and the boy, and then the three of you together. I’d just change the setting a little so it wouldn’t be the full price of the usual family portrait.’

  ‘We’ll see, we’ll see,’ said William and wished he hadn’t come.

  Little William Joseph toddled towards the photographer’s equipment and Bridget swept him up before he reached the pile of glass plates. ‘You must be beautiful,’ she told him, ‘and not pull at Mammy’s hair. And be very still for Mr Middleton. Otherwise you’ll be just a blur like Paddy Madden’s children were.’

  She turned to William. ‘Your family don’t know what you look like at all. You have a beard for one thing, which you didn’t have, leastways, when I came to Ballarat. You was clean-shaven, a boy more or less. And you had rather more hair on top. Also, you looked more like an Irishman in those days, being somewhat poorly dressed. So I imagine your dear mother and father would be rather pleased of what’s become of their boy Billy.’

  ‘Maybe they wouldn’t want to know,’ said William.

  ‘You’re still a handsome man,’ said Bridget. ‘Isn’t he a handsome man?’ she asked the photographer.

  ‘Very handsome gentleman indeed,’ said the photographer. ‘Now, Madam, we’ll seat you in front of this palm tree, on the Turkey chair, which has nice ornamental carving.’ He looked dubiously at William Joseph. ‘You think the boy will stay still on your knee, Madam?’

  ‘He will,’ said Bridget, ‘but we should proceed quickly. He’s only a year and not blessed with much patience.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Mr Middleton. ‘And we may strew the flowers across the floor here, as in a glade.’

  ‘A
glade?’ asked Bridget.

  ‘The glade is very fashionable for family portraits. And we’ll put Mr Irwin here. And this Grecian urn here for effect. But not the whole basket of fernery, or it might crowd the picture.’

  ‘It might indeed,’ said William, but as the photographer retreated behind his cloak, he slipped out of the picture, leaving the photographer to record just Bridget and little William Joseph. For some reason, which felt very strong, but which he did not quite understand, he did not wish to send his portrait to his family. He did not want them thinking he was so much older and his hair thinning. But it was more than vanity. The sense of time passing, moving forward, felt natural here in Ballarat, but the thought of himself getting older here and his family back at Knockaleery also getting older but apart from each other felt unnatural. His life had moved forward, and although they were better off and more secure back in Knockaleery, there was a sense of decline in their letters.

  It distressed him to hear of his poor mother’s health, for he had broken his promise to her about going back after six years, and while they never rebuked him, the thing stood. And though Eliza wrote how well Father was, he hated to think of his eighty years, which went through his head again and again. He could only think of Knockaleery being how it was when he left, when they were young, with life ahead of them, not the slow winding down he had begun to sense in the letters. It was why, perhaps, he left more of the correspondence to Bridget now, for he found it hard to tell them of this life, which was so far beyond their own.

  ‘Look at the birdie; watch the birdie.’ Little William’s face turned up towards the photographer and magically, he held the pose, so when Bridget went to collect the photo the next week, the child’s image was as clear and beautiful as her own.

  That night, as they were going to bed, William picked it up from the dressing table. ‘I like to look at you,’ he said. ‘It gives me a different feeling about you, as if we were still just courting.’

  Bridget wasn’t sure she wanted to be compared to her own photograph. ‘I wouldn’t want you thinking of me all flat and in sepia tone, with my real self coming out at a disadvantage,’ she said. ‘Although I dare say I’m more convenient to you on a piece of card than in real life.’

  ‘Much more convenient,’ he said. He stood behind her and took the hairbrush to brush her hair, their eyes meeting in the mirror. ‘This Bridget in the picture isn’t always asking me to move the baby’s cradle this way and that, or to give Danny Phelan grief about his shirt not being quite white enough to wait tables, or wanting a little gold brooch like Mrs McGowan’s.’ He curled the end of her hair round his finger and kissed the top of her head. ‘You give me far less grief on paper. Not worrying about what pleases you and what doesn’t.’

  She put her arms up around him and drew him down, his face into her neck where she dabbed her lavender oil. ‘I wouldn’t wish to compete with a wife who’s so flat and yet so perfect. I’ll put the portrait away in my drawer and when I’m dead and gone, you may look at it sometimes, so you may remember me.’

  CHAPTER 11

  ‘A dirty deed!’

  ‘The dogs!’

  ‘Bastards!’

  ‘Damn them!’

  ‘They crossed the floor to do it.’

  ‘Humffray and Cathie stood for the small selector. They gave us their word on that. They were to rid us of the squatters and give the small farmers a chance. And now they’ve stabbed us in the back!’

  The men in the bar of the John O’Groats were in a fury. John Basson Humffray had always stood solid for the small man’s right to land, against the power of the squatters. It was therefore with great shock that the people of Ballarat learned that afternoon in March 1862 that the two members of the Legislative Assembly for Ballarat East, John Humffray and John Cathie, had voted in the parliament to extend the squatters’ leases for ten years. The news of it was the only news in the bar, and the anger swept in by the lunchtime crowd was nursed along by the afternoon drinkers.

  The land question had been one of the great issues in politics since the time of Eureka, more than seven years ago. There was much feeling against the squatters for they held vast tracts on leasehold and they were rich and powerful. The smaller settlers, many of whom were from farming stock, were locked off the land. William had no personal interest in becoming a farmer, but he had sympathy for those who did, many of whom were Irish, and who had the skills, yet not the chance, to work a farm.

  ‘Well, Billy Irwin,’ said one red-faced digger to William as he poured the fellow a drink. ‘I hope you won’t be entertaining Mr Humffray in this hotel ever again.’

  ‘I hope it’s not true,’ said William. ‘I’ve only ever known Mr Humffray as the most principled of men.’

  ‘Damn him,’ said one. ‘He betrayed us at Eureka.’

  Another old digger got to his feet. ‘No! He stuck to his own guns then. He’s always stuck to his own guns. A moral force man. Moral, mind you. That’s why we voted for him. Which is why betraying us on this is worse than anything ever happened back in ’54.’ He thumped the bar to emphasise his fury. ‘There’s no morality there now!’

  ‘He done it for money.’

  ‘That’s certain. His brother went broke a while back.’

  ‘No excuse!’

  ‘Damn corruption. Any man can see the corruption there. Mark my word, those squatters would have had their cheque books out.’

  ‘No slanderous comments in my bar,’ said William. ‘On any gentleman whatsoever.’

  ‘They aren’t gentlemen in our book.’

  ‘It’s the Victoria Association,’ said a heated coach driver. ‘They pay for votes in the house. Plain as the nose on my face.’

  ‘Which is glowing nicely purple.’

  ‘Do you think it’s true?’ William asked Danny Phelan, as they went down to the cellar to bring up another barrel of beer. He felt sick at both the news and the reaction. It seemed inconceivable Humffray had voted with the squatters. He could understand the indignation of his drinkers, but he could not believe anyone would think John Humffray corrupt.

  ‘Humffray and Cathie voted that way,’ said Danny. ‘And the bill that favoured the squatters was passed by a single vote. So it was them decided which way it went. That’s what’s in the newspaper.’

  ‘Why would he have voted that way? Him and Cathie? They stood on unlocking the land. Humffray pushed the Land Commission.’

  ‘So they did,’ said Danny. ‘So you draw your own conclusion.’

  ‘Cathie’s a teetotaller. And a coffin-maker,’ said William, ‘which may make him miserable, but generally less inclined to corruption.’

  ‘What of your friend Humffray?’ asked Danny. ‘He’s said to be broke.’

  ‘I would swear blind there is no corruption there,’ said William. ‘He is transparently honest.’ He fastened the rope around the keg.

  ‘Transparent, anyway,’ said Danny, a touch of mockery in his voice.

  William kept hold of the rope. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘You and I were both his voters. He told us he would push for our right to land. Ten years doesn’t seem much to squatters. In fact, the way they talk it seems like nothing. But in ten years time, when I’m nearing fifty or more, I’ll be further into life and badly fitted for the hard slog of it. So it seems to me, my dream of becoming a farmer is good as gone. The squatters have had the land long enough. It was time to indulge us in a little democracy.’

  ‘I agree with you,’ said William. ‘Except I don’t believe that my friend John Basson Humffray is anything but honest.’

  ‘You’ll find it hard to get any support for the incorruptible John Humffray in your bar,’ said Danny. ‘They’re dancing on his political grave already, and to my mind, the logic of the thing is with them. And maybe, seeing you never wished to be a farmer, you might be more forgiving of your friend John Humffray than those of us who dreamed of that.’

  William was despondent. Most of his drinkers were I
rish who had followed him from the Star. There were also many Scots, for the John O’Groats was a Caledonian pub. And it was the Scots and the Irish who most of all longed for land and were hurt by the decision. Many, knowing he was Humffray’s friend, seemed to find particular satisfaction in gloating to him of Humffray’s betrayal of his electors, as well as impugning his honesty. He should have known better than to argue, but his friendship with Humffray was a deep thing, and he would not allow a slur on Humffray’s honesty to pass. One fiery Scot was so incensed by William’s defence of Humffray that he led a group of drinkers out of the bar.

  ‘Don’t think we’ll be drinking in your pub ever again, Billy Irwin,’ he shouted. ‘I never thought you’d be voting for the squatters.’

  After closing the bar, he heard the same story, in more polite terms, from men who had dined at the hotel and who had stayed afterwards to enjoy a glass of cognac. Some of them were for Humffray, some of them against, but they all agreed that he had changed his political colours.

  ‘I can’t believe he’s been dishonest,’ William said to Bridget as they scraped the dinner plates in the kitchen for Charity. ‘But I can’t understand why he would vote that way. He’s always stood up for selectors and opposed the squatters from the start.’

  ‘You yourself know he was in considerable trouble with money,’ said Bridget. ‘Maybe he had no choice.’ She emptied the kettle into the sink and put another one on the stove. She wiped her forehead. ‘I’d tell a few lies meself to get us a night maid. I hate this late-night drudge.’

  ‘He is a man of absolute honesty.’

  ‘He is a man of absolutes, I give you,’ said Bridget as she scrubbed at the dishes. ‘But at times, it seems he does not understand more simple things. I imagine myself that it would not be hard to lure John Basson Humffray into a trap. Where he might be inclined to compromise one thing for another.’