The Commandant

by Jessica Anderson

  He had finished. He put down his pen, singing.

  ‘For thy a-bun-dant peace. Good-day to you, Mar-ger-ee.’

  ‘You know it is not Margery,’ says the woman who has come in with a broom.

  ‘It is Pol-lee,’ sings Henry.

  ‘You know it is,’ she says, with a sidelong glance.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘And this is our Mr Mu’wy.’

  Letty held James Murray’s right hand in both of hers, and looked not at Frances, but teasingly into the young man’s face. He was twenty-three, tall and powerful, with large dark eyes and thin tender lips set in a half smile.

  ‘His family has taken gweat estates in the south,’ said Letty.

  ‘The southern highlands,’ amended James Murray, turning to Frances and bowing as well as he could with one hand in Letty’s.

  ‘Millions of acres,’ said Letty.

  ‘Thousands,’ said Murray, smiling at Frances.

  ‘—all stwewn with stwange boulders. And this is my dear sister Fwances.’

  ‘Is it of volcanic origin?’ asked Frances in an alert manner.

  He replied in the same forced tone. ‘We believe it is, Miss O’Beirne.’

  ‘Do sit down, my loves,’ murmured Letty, herself sitting again on the blue sofa and picking up her embroidery frame. At the other end of the room Madge Noakes and Elizabeth Robertson were setting up the card tables, for there was to be an informal gathering to welcome Captain Clunie and Frances. Letty held her embroidery aslant to the light of the window. The candles were not yet lit. There was a pale fire in the grate and across the wide verandah the green blaze of the evening garden.

  ‘Is there good pasturing in such stony country?’ enquired Frances.

  ‘Unless the season is dry, Miss O’Beirne, the country is good for cattle as well as sheep.’

  ‘But not for women,’ said Letty. ‘The poor wives are hundweds of miles apart. They have no society.’ She gave Murray a teasing look. ‘Who would be bawoness of the boulders?’

  ‘Not I!’ said Louisa Harbin, entering and giving her mantle to Madge Noakes. ‘We are better off here. At least we converse.’ She advanced into the room arranging her long necklaces of Madras silver. Dressed in white, and so tall, her red hair muted by the dusk of the room, she momentarily gave an effect of beauty. Murray sprang to his feet and bowed. ‘James,’ she said, in smiling maternal acknowledgement. She sat in one of Letty’s silk chairs. ‘Victor sends his compliments and apologies. He will come shortly with Amelia and Lieutenant Bulwer. You have been talking to Frances, James. Frances is well-informed. I once thought to be well-informed myself, but had to settle at last for a pitiful ignorance.’

  ‘But you are well-informed, Mrs Harbin,’ said Frances.

  Louisa sent her a glance of annoyance before turning again to James Murray. ‘What is this curious story of a black prisoner?’

  Bringing himself to the edge of his chair, and losing his shyness in the interest of his story, he told them of the black prisoner who had been thought near death. Elizabeth Robertson, shuffling about the room with a taper, lighting candles, murmured half-audibly as she listened.

  ‘Dear, dear . . .’

  ‘Well I never . . .’

  When James Murray finished he turned both hands upward and looked in turn at the three candlelit faces. ‘I won’t say a miracle. An inexplicable recovery.’

  ‘But he may not have recovered,’ said Louisa. ‘He may have died on the way home.’

  ‘No. He was seen this evening by men coming in from the Limestone Station. He had met with a hunting party from his own tribe, and himself had caught a lizard.’

  ‘Dear, dear,’ murmured the servant. ‘Think of that now. They eat them, the heathens.’

  ‘A black Lazarus,’ said Louisa. ‘Isn’t there a white one among the prisoners? And quite as savage?’

  ‘There is,’ said James Murray. ‘But let us not compare our black with the Lazarus raised from the dead. In his case there was no divine intervention.’

  ‘But if he wasn’t raised,’ said Frances, ‘he must have raised himself. And how is it possible to use the will for purposes of dying and recovery?’

  ‘Only by making it the instrument of a higher will.’

  ‘In any case, a useful facility,’ remarked Louisa.

  ‘Especially for wecov’wy.’

  ‘Oh, ma’am,’ said James Murray, turning to Letty, ‘pray let me repeat that at such levels the will belongs to God.’

  Suddenly the servant was fully audible. ‘Or to their black devils!’

  ‘That will be all, Elizabeth. You may bwing the childwen for a few minutes when the commandant comes in fwom his office. Amelia, my love!’ And Letty rose and went forward to greet the three new arrivals: Amelia, Lancelot Bulwer, and Victor Harbin.

  At the servant’s cry James Murray had murmured an excuse and hurried to the french doors as if some sudden recollection had sent him to overlook the river. Frances glimpsed his moving lips and the quick touch of fingers to forehead and breast, and the sight brought into her own breast such a surge of homesickness that she impulsively rose and went to stand at his side. He gave her a startled flutter of a smile and turned again to the river. Standing beside him, watching the men on the bank hauling up the small boats, she felt the emanation of his shyness, and by its contagion became tongue-tied. Her confused intention had been to speak to him of Sligo, of Bridie and Meg and the two little girls; but the closest she could get to home, after a struggle, was by saying stiffly, ‘You—attended Trinity College, I believe, Mr Murray?’

  ‘I did, Miss O’Beirne. And were you at a Dublin academy?’

  ‘I was not. Though Letty and Cassandra were with the Missis Wollstonecraft. You must have fine memories of your college, Mr Murray.’

  Whether from an instinct to please him, or to announce indirectly her longing for home, she had said not ‘fine’ but something like ‘foine’. ‘Oh, Miss O’Beirne,’ he replied, ‘it was the life I was meant for. Had I been provided for, I would have stayed a scholar all my days. For a man constituted as I am, it is a calamity not to be provided for.’

  She said, startled yet flat, ‘You don’t care for this place.’

  But he recoiled from such directness, explaining with anxious eagerness that nobody could have been kinder to him than the people here, and no government more generous than the one he had the honour to serve. He spoke of his comfortable quarters, his servants, his horse, his fruit and vegetable garden, his ration of good food. And for anyone of an enquiring turn of mind, what could be of more advantage, he asked, than the strange flora and fauna, the curious river and sea creatures and the grotesque or exquisite insects? Especially the last, he said, especially the insects.

  The care of her little sisters had fostered the maternal in Frances’s nature. She saw that she had frightened him, and to reassure him became as eager in agreement as he in explanation, so that they made together a false accord that came to an end only by her sudden comprehension of what was implied by the work of the men on the river bank. She had watched, but had been too engrossed to interpret, the stripping and securing of the boats, and the locking of the chains. But now the men were carrying away the oars and sails. She put a hand to her left cheek. ‘So we are marooned every night!’

  ‘Not marooned.’ He laughed. ‘Marooned is not the word.’

  ‘It’s the word that came to me. Yes, it is wrong, but it feels right.’

  He laughed again. ‘We would be more truly marooned,’ he said, ‘if the boats were seized and used for an escape. That—’ he nodded towards the river—‘prevents it.’

  ‘It still makes me feel marooned.’

  He moved nearer her. His voice was clear and gentle. ‘Miss O’Beirne, don’t let it.’

  The affection she
felt for him was as calm as if it were of old standing. Remembering Letty’s injunction about her smallpox scars, she lowered her left hand and clasped it in the other. Patrick Logan, with Collison and Gilligan, came into view. They walked rapidly along the river bank, pausing at each boat while Gilligan bent to test the locks. But the dread and doubt they aroused in Frances was soothed by the presence of the young man at her side. So gentle, so sensitive, yet engaged, in a way, in the same business as Gilligan the scourger, he was surely a guarantee against its excesses. Reeds, he was telling her, grew in profusion up the river, and the men went up and gathered them for basket making. The three on the river bank passed out of sight while he spoke. After a glance over his shoulder he turned again to face the room, and she turned with him, guessing that he would think it improper, or even compromising, to stand apart with her for so long. And indeed, he now raised his voice so that anyone might know that they were speaking only of reeds and flowers.

  ‘You arrived too late in winter, Miss O’Beirne, for the full glory of the acacias.’

  Presently they were joined by Letty.

  ‘James, if you are to take Mr Cowper’s place at the hospital, so that he may be pwesent here for a short time, pway do so in the first part of the evening, when tea will be the only dwink served.’

  ‘I will leave at once.’

  ‘No, no. You must first be pwesented to Captain Clunie.’

  Patrick Logan appeared in the doorway. Frances heard Letty’s murmur of pleasure and saw with surprise that as she crossed the room to him she reverted to the fast little gliding step that the provincial Missis Wollstonecraft had thought proper. But even more surprising to Frances was their meeting. He threw an arm about her waist like a yokel, and they kissed.

  Behind their disengaging figures Captain Clunie and Lieutenant Edwards appeared. Letty, with a smile for young Edwards, took Captain Clunie by the hand and led him towards James Murray, the only person present he had yet to meet. As Murray awaited them, Frances saw him stiffen his shoulders and run his tongue along his upper lip. Moved to tenderness by his timidity, she failed to see in it a threat to the reassurance she had just received from his gentleness.

  ‘Such a proposition would tempt any man,’ said Clunie.

  ‘But even free grants must be stocked,’ objected James Murray.

  ‘And sheep are expensive beasts,’ said Patrick Logan.

  ‘And cattle more so,’ added Letty.

  ‘The sale of my father’s commission,’ said Murray, ‘was barely enough for his first flock.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Clunie, ‘but all the same, it would tempt any man.’

  It plainly tempted the three who had heard Murray’s story (augmented by yesterday’s mail) of his father’s land in the south. Clunie, Logan, and Edwards had all become thoughtful. Just as plainly, it did not tempt the two lieutenants, Harbin and Bulwer, nor Peter Spicer and Mr Commissary Hansord. These four, with Amelia and Louisa, were at cards within hearing range, but none had bothered to turn his head.

  Frances, determined to please Letty by taking part in the conversation, but intimidated by Logan’s presence, rather blurted out her question.

  ‘Does your father live on his grant?’

  ‘Why, no, he rents a farm near Sydney.’

  ‘A gentleman need not live on his grant,’ said Lieutenant Edwards, looking in his frank and easy way from face to face, ‘he may put in an overseer.’

  ‘My father put in my brother,’ said Murray, with some dryness.

  ‘Who now has gweat gwants of his own,’ Letty told them all.

  ‘He had not enough capital to trust it to an overseer,’ said James.

  ‘What age is your brother, sir?’ asked Clunie.

  ‘Terence is nineteen.’

  There was an undertone of excitement in the murmur that went round the group. It infected Frances with the wish to say that Mr Smith Hall’s son, whom he was forced to leave on his Bathurst property when he went to jail, was only sixteen. But happening to catch Patrick Logan’s eyes upon her, she knew she could not say it, however incidental she might manage to make it sound, for he did have a way of looking, a particular cold blueness, that intimidated her even when, as now, she knew that he was hardly seeing her, but was thinking of something else.

  He said to the air, ‘Of course, it would be vastly different from farming in Scotland.’

  ‘Patwick farmed in B’wickshire,’ explained Letty.

  ‘I farmed in Berwickshire,’ he said, as if he had not heard her. ‘It was after the war. I had long declared I wanted it above all things, and vowed to do it. So had to do it, even after I knew I could not.’

  ‘Patwick does not mean he was not capable,’ cried Letty.

  ‘I don’t mean I was not capable. But I was plagued with a restlessness, d’you see? that made me want to escape the place. I was like a man bursting to run, who had taken his solemn oath to stay still.’

  ‘Your oath to whom?’ asked Clunie.

  ‘Why, only to myself. Never to my father. No, not as an oath. And yet my father’s death released me. Well, it took that death. I went back to the army, and was never so grateful to go anywhere. But up there,’ he said, looking at James Murray, ‘that’s new country. It would be different up there.’

  ‘Different indeed, sir. The obstacles are greater.’

  ‘So are the rewards, man.’

  ‘The rewards are sometimes bankruptcy. And supposing they end transportation?’

  ‘They won’t,’ said Logan.

  ‘Not for a long time,’ said Clunie simultaneously.

  ‘No. And you can say what you please,’ said Edwards, scanning the group and speaking in his clear affable voice, ‘a man’s nothing without land.’

  ‘In peace time, that’s so,’ said Clunie.

  ‘Are you not tempted, Murray?’ asked Edwards.

  ‘Once I have accumulated enough capital—’ said Murray, but then gave a deprecating laugh and said that all the same, even then, he would not lightly leave his good post here. Enumerating again his comforts and benefits, he lost the interest of his audience, who barely waited until he had finished before drifting away, the men to the card tables and Letty to the kitchen to instruct her servants.

  Alone again with Murray, Frances said, ‘Your brother is only nineteen. I know of a young man who manages his father’s property at Bathurst. Man? He is a boy. Sixteen.’

  ‘Do you mean that editor fellow? His son?’

  ‘I do. Mr Smith Hall.’

  ‘You do right to speak his name so quietly, Miss O’Beirne. But on this settlement you would do better not to speak it at all.’

  ‘Well, his charges against my brother are monstrous, I suppose.’

  ‘He has become a monstrous fellow altogether. I used to be in sympathy with some of his proposals, but that was in his saner days. Whereas now—Oh, such a style of writing! Such low and scurrilous language! It must lose him the sympathy of all persons of moderation, and most certainly all those of good taste.’

  ‘James . . .’ said Letty, approaching.

  He bowed. ‘I am going at once, ma’am. You will have Cowper instead.’

  ‘It is not a good exchange,’ said Letty with sympathy. ‘Dine on Thursday, dear James, and help me show Fwances the southern constellations.’

  ‘Tea,’ said Henry Cowper. ‘Only tea. They know how to drive me back to my quarters. I shall allot them—’ he drew his watch from his pocket—‘twenty minutes of my time. What were we speaking of?’

  ‘The blacks and the runaways,’ said Clunie.

  ‘Yes. You ask what governs their fraternisation. Lewis Lazarus told me the blacks sometimes welcome a runaway as the returned spirit of a dead kinsman. Apart from that, I know nothing. They seem to me perfectly unpredictable. They may kill our runaways, or
pet and feed them. They may give them up to the military, or carry messages to their mates in the gangs. Not in words. They’re great mimics. Prisoners have told me that when they come to the gangs on the outskirts to give them news of a runaway, they copy the bearing of the man so well that it is known at once who is meant. I used to pass such information to the commandant, but stopped because it made for confusion. The prisoners not being above making up such stories, you see, for the simple pleasure of watching the soldiers march off into the bush for nothing. Of course you have heard the story of our prodigious black patient. What is your explanation?’

  ‘I expect he was shamming.’

  ‘The opinion of all of the military. I have been quizzing them. I once heard a man in Sydney say that the trouble with New South Wales was not too many convicts, but too many incompetents of good family, and too much of the military. That man was Smith Hall. You won’t take offence if I say that on that point I rather agree with him.’

  Clunie was offended. He gave his useful little blink, however, and smiled. ‘I hope you don’t agree on any others.’

  ‘Well, certainly not that everyone, emancipist or free, should have leave to publicly spout his opinions. If every man is licensed to say what he thinks, what becomes of Henry Cowper’s special licence?’

  His clown’s licence, thought Clunie. Patiently smiling, he glanced over at the card tables; everyone there was engrossed, either in playing or watching. He looked at the blue sofa, where Amelia Bulwer was talking to Frances O’Beirne, and caught a few of her words.

  ‘The youngest is six . . .’

  He turned back to Cowper. ‘Would you like a pipe?’

  Henry drew out his pipe as they went through the french doors to the verandah. Clunie did not smoke. He clasped his hands at his back. ‘You told me on the Isabella that Captain Logan stands in real danger from Smith Hall.’