‘Where would we get the money? You heard what James said. How would we stock the land?’
‘Murray’s father sold his commission.’
‘By the time we could a’wange that, we may be in India.’
‘May we? How do I know? Have I heard from my commanding officer? I know nothing. I hear nothing. I am cut off.’
She saw him threatened again by his irritability and gloom. ‘If we must be farmers,’ she said coaxingly, let us await a weply from the company. Then you could wesign.’
‘Clunie says the agricultural company has chosen a manager.’
‘How does Captain Clunie know?’
‘He heard.’
‘Oh, the things people hear . . . we will not know until they answer your letter. They must answer soon.’
‘Must they indeed? They are under no obligation. It seems nobody is under an obligation but me, who is obliged always to wait. I will tell you—’
‘Patwick—’
‘I will tell you this. If Macleay’s letter does not come by the next ship, I will write to the governor.’ But then he said, as if in indignant reply to someone else’s suggestion, ‘No! I will not. It would betray anxiety. I won’t do it!’
Lines of fatigue had appeared on her face. ‘Patwick,’ she said helplessly. ‘My love . . .’ She rang the bell for Elizabeth to come and put the room to rights. ‘What will happen?’ she wanted to ask. But now, standing on the hearth and watching the fire, he suddenly laughed.
‘Cowper is the greatest of fools. He said the black man was dying because he wished to. He said he was impressed with the delicacy of the operation. The delicacy! And he named what white men must do if they wish to die. It put me in mind of the army of occupation, of my time in France. Suicide used to be fashionable. Young fellows—’
‘I know,’ she said, ‘you told me.’
‘I remember how young fellows—’
She threw her arms about him. ‘My love, you have told me one hundwed hundwed times. Hush. Here is Elizabeth. Hush.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘Do you recall our talk on the Regent Bird? When I said I was at the mercy of my company? I shan’t say it is no longer true—’
‘Wait,’ said Louisa. ‘First let us walk a beetle. I must get those legs.’
Frances took a beetle from the perforated box and set it on the palm of her other hand. ‘But I shall say it is less true.’
‘I am sure of it. Come, creature, walk.’
‘He always tries to fly first.’
The beetle could not fly because James Murray had sealed its wings with a scrap of spider web. Since it was only a common beetle, he would unseal its wings when it had served its purpose and release it into the perils of its own world. When it found it could not fly it began to walk towards Frances’s wrist, while Louisa, eyes darting and hands swift, made sketches of it all over her page. From these she would devise the motion for the anoplognathus beetle she was copying for James Murray. The anoplognathus was big and rare and rotund, with dragon shards of green and gold, and golden globular eyes on either side of a wedged head. But it was dead, impaled on a long pin, and its six legs trailed downward like dry litter, so that the walking beetle was needed to provide for it an exemplar of life. The live beetle passed over Frances’s wrist and struggled up the inside of her arm. It was small, and of a plain brown, but James Murray said that all beetles of that class walked in the same way. Louisa had replied that she trusted he was right, because they would never make their fortunes out of insects with unscientific walks. It was their intention to send the drawings, with Murray’s text, to a London publisher. James Murray was enthusiastic about the project, and for Louisa, from whose nature enthusiasm was absent, it was something to do. When the beetle arrived at the frill falling from Frances’s white muslin sleeve it came to a stop. It was the end of September, already warm enough for muslin; Frances had been at Moreton Bay for more than six weeks. For the last three she had been taking drawing lessons from Louisa, but they usually ended, as this one was doing, by her putting aside her own work to help Louisa. She plucked the beetle from her arm and held it between a thumb and forefinger. ‘Again?’
‘No. I shall try now to fit his legs to my sketch. If I can find it.’
Frances put the beetle back in the box. ‘I am still at the mercy of the children at the school.’
‘And of one other,’ said Louisa, searching in her portfolio of drawings.
‘Yes,’ said Frances, ‘of him.’
‘Why?’
‘He has only to give me a blue look.’
‘Pass his blue looks. Pass them by.’
‘I do.’
‘I have seen you. You look as if you might burst. Where can that sketch be?’
‘You have not seen me lately. I pass them by very meekly now. Because lately, if I irritate him, he extends his displeasure to Letty. And then the strangest thing happens. She becomes thin and blanched looking—yes, all in an hour—and doesn’t hear what one says to her. So now I contrive to be perfectly meek.’
‘Strive instead for perfect composure. Here he is. Here is greenback.’
‘He is beautiful even without legs. He is a scarab.’
Frances, with her chin on her interlaced hands, watched while Louisa lightly pencilled in the legs beneath the painted body. ‘Wrong,’ she said. She erased them and tried again, and again, while Frances said nothing, but watched with sober respect. The great change in Frances’s manner and appearance was not owing only to pressure by three women. Two weeks after her arrival the Alligator had brought a letter from Edmund Joyce, which she had opened with the lightest of expectations because she had begun to forget him.
‘My very dear girl, was ever a wretch more cast down than I have been since your departure? Your absence has taught me how I grew to rely, during our long voyage, on your sweet and eager presence at my side. I curse the fate that took you to that place, and yet do not curse it, because it was needed to teach me your importance. Such an insensible fool I was . . .’
He had first covered the page horizontally and had then written vertically over his own writing, so that it took her about fifteen minutes to read. By that time she knew it was not a joke, or a mistake, and yet was no less astounded than when she had learned from the first three words that she was his very dear girl. Stunned, moving like a sleep walker, she took it to Letty. The Alligator had brought neither the letter covering Captain Clunie’s appointment nor the awaited advice from Colonel Allen of the regiment’s posting, but Letty surmounted her own distress, read Edmund Joyce’s letter, smiled and exclaimed over it, and advised her how to answer it. Frances had already written to Edmund Joyce, as well as to Elizabeth and Barbara Hall, telling them of her work with Robert and at the school, correcting their misconceptions of the settlement, and adding that the cause in which they all believed would not be advanced by inaccuracies. But she had not folded or sealed her letters, and she now sat down at her mother’s desk and added a postscript to Edmund’s, saying, as Letty had suggested, that though no young lady could help but be pleased and flattered by such a letter, she would take it kindly if he wrote no more like it without first asking the permission of her sister. She was amazed and elated to be loved, but a thread of sobriety in her elation reminded her that if he had failed to write she would have relinquished their friendship with regret but without grief. The elation, however, refused to be quenched by the sobriety, and the next morning, while dressing her hair, she suddenly, and with the greatest of ease, devised a style for herself so becoming that Letty, when she saw it, folded her hands and gasped.
‘Why did not I think of that?’
‘I can’t think how I thought of it.’
After that day, drawing the approval of those about her, she fed on it, and gave it back in looks and manners ever more inducive
of their approval, seldom reverting to her former gaucherie except with the children at the school, and (although less often now) with her brother-in-law. Into the mild incessant waters shaping a shore, these were the rough stones thrown, the disrupters of expected tides. However, Amelia Bulwer lodged close enough to the school to hear the rumpus with the pupils and to intervene, and as for Patrick Logan, she could at least be grateful for seeing so little of him. Six more men had escaped, among them Bulbridge and Fagan, who had run together as soon as Fagan had gone back from the hospital to his gang. One of the six was found drowned, and three returned, but Bulbridge and Fagan had got clear away. The commandant was increasingly morose; he took his breakfast and left the house early; he went for days at a time to Dunwich or the Limestone Station. Frances longed for him to go on his proposed journey of exploration.
Only the signal from the next ship to arrive, the Mary Elizabeth, revived his spirits. In the mailbag were two letters from Edmund Joyce, one for her and one for Letty. There was no reply from the Hall girls, and again, neither of the letters expected by the commandant arrived. Letty, silent and distracted, could scarcely attend to either of Edmund’s letters, and Frances, sensitive to her sister’s moods (though ignorant of her particular fears for her husband) withdrew to her room to let her recover. Here she read Edmund Joyce’s letter again. Although she had corrected his belief that her mail was censored, it was clear that in some matters he was taking no chances. He had heard a rumour, he wrote, that her brother-in-law was soon to be in Sydney, ‘on one business or another’, and hoped for the great joy of meeting her. And if the captain’s business was such as would not be approved by certain of their mutual friends, why, that need not cast its reflection on them. He had not seen those mutual friends lately because he had been staying with his uncle and aunt at their estate in the Hunter Valley. His uncle and aunt, far from being the tory ogres he had imagined, were perfectly delightful. And he went on to describe his uncle’s house. ‘A stone house with a wide verandah and a pillared portico such as no English gentleman would be ashamed to own.’ His uncle’s convict servants were ‘happier than most of their kind in England and had a hundred times more chance of future prosperity’, and although he had not abated one jot of his former opinions, he began to think that reform was better carried out by individual acts of kindness rather than by ‘unleashing the refractory passions of the press’.
By this time Letty had rallied. She came in fluttering her letter from Edmund and pronounced it ‘vewy pwop’ly put’. She wrote her reply, also very properly put, at their mother’s desk, but this time did not advise Frances on hers. The next day brought a warm change, and Frances was able to wear for the first time one of the muslin dresses cut by Amelia and sewn by Letty and herself. Henry Cowper walked round her in circles, staring. ‘I met someone like her on the Regent Bird,’ he told Letty. ‘It must have been her mother.’ He had come to bandage Robert’s hand because James Murray was at the Eagle Farm. Escorted by Madge Noakes, Frances went to the school. It was Amelia’s habit to walk up and down in front of her pupils and speak in a ringing unanswerable voice, but Frances, lacking this authority, kept to the old way of collecting them about her chair and dealing with them one by one. She invariably failed to control them, but on this day, sitting and looking into their upturned faces, she mistook her inner excitement, generated by the warm day and by her new expectations, for love of them, and did not see how they could fail to submit to such benign authority. Ten minutes later Amelia Bulwer rushed into the schoolroom with her servant Maria. With threats and bangs they mustered the shouting turbulent children. They seated them in a tight squad and Amelia then marched up and down in front of them and instructed them in a ringing unanswerable voice. When the bell rang for the midday muster, and the yellow lines of prisoners began to converge on the barracks for their hour of dinner and rest, the pupils were dismissed. In her room at home, Frances stood at the window, untying her bonnet strings and looking with the unsensitive eyes of habit at the roads, trodden out by hampered feet, that lay between her window and the botanical gardens on the other side of the point. She could see, set in treetops, the roof of the octagonal cottage (which she now knew as Hobson’s Cottage), but trees to the left of her window hid all the main part of the settlement, hid from her view Captain Clunie entering his cottage, and hid the subsiding billows of dust at the gates of the prisoners’ barracks. Her room was on the same side of the house as the nursery. Below in the garden Gilligan was sitting on the ground with his knees raised, peaceably smoking his pipe. She no longer saw Martin working in the garden. The day after she had spoken about him to Letty, the boy who helped with the bullocks had been injured. Martin, partly by Letty’s contrivance, had been sent to take his place, and Frances now saw him only in the chapel on Sundays. The official party, respectful in silks and braided uniforms, entered the chapel last, watched by the iron gangs and guards in the gallery, and the prisoners and military below, but not by Henry Cowper, whose head was always bowed as if in preliminary prayer. Here and there in the congregation were children’s faces, and Frances, looking about for those she taught, would find her gaze catching on a thin dark face, and as her own eyes continued their search she would feel the intensity of a stare that persisted until Henry Cowper raised his head and said with absolutely uninflected solemnity, ‘Let us pray.’ Bowing her head allowed her to escape those begging, unnerving eyes. She was thankful that he no longer worked in the garden.
Gilligan rose and knocked out his pipe, and Frances, as she turned from the window, heard voices in the nursery. She flung her bonnet on the bed and ran to see who had arrived. James Murray was kneeling to examine Lucy’s knee, which the little girl had set up in competition with Robert’s cut hand, while Letty stood nearby with Robert leaning against her. Frances, standing in the doorway in her soft white muslin, drew from James Murray such an exclamation of pleasure and amazement that she laughed and said she would presently decide whether to be complimented or offended. Their friendship had quickly been consolidated, but in his case depended upon the presence of others; when Letty left them alone for a minute or two he would become distracted with nervousness and look often and beseechingly at the door.
To indulge Lucy, he bandaged her knee, and they all took tea and cold meat in the nursery, because, Letty said, invalids must be consoled. The warmth had made the children restless; they would not eat, but fidgeted and chanted. Frances, standing at the french doors, could hear above their chanting Letty and James Murray planning an evening of theatricals. She looked over the trodden roads and longed to ride. But no horses had yet arrived, and presently she turned and proposed a walk. Letty, who had not been out of the house since her miscarriage, protested almost in fright, but was persuaded by Robert’s eagerness and Murray’s earnest advice. A panama hat was fetched for Robert, a bonnet for Lucy, and parasols for Letty and Frances, and with James Murray as escort, they all left the house and took the road along the river bank. While Letty talked of the proposed theatricals, which she said could be in celebration of Frances’s eighteenth birthday in October, they sauntered past the cottages, the hospital, the brick kiln, and the graveyard, and presently came to grassy paddocks bounded on one side by the river. The gangs had gone back to work, and they met with nothing but a water cart drawn by four bullocks and accompanied by two men. One of these was Martin.
‘Martin!’ cried Robert.
‘Martin,’ quavered Lucy.
But Murray grasped the boy’s shoulder when he would have run to the cart, and Letty held Lucy’s hand. Frances bent, as if against a wind, and sheltered her head with her parasol, so that beyond recognising that it was Martin, she was not forced to look at his face. The bullocks were pulling well, but as the two groups drew apart he made his whip crack and cried to them with desperate loudness to get on there.
‘Gaah-on! You there!’
Before Murray and Robert and the children lay a grassy field, fragrant in the wa
rmth, and when Robert plunged into it a multitude of white butterflies rose and fluttered above the pale flowing grass. ‘Elodina parthia,’ said Murray. ‘So they are here in the north as well!’ Martin’s whip and voice had almost died away. The wings of the butterflies were thin as tissue paper and veined like leaves. Standing in the long grass, Murray put forward for the first time the idea of an illustrated book on the insects of the district. They seized on it with enthusiasm. Theatricals were forgotten. They turned in their tracks and hurried to lay it before Louisa.
Louisa, as she finished painting the legs of the anoplognathus beetle in brownish-black, could not help looking pleased. In the two weeks since James Murray had put forward his plan, she had worked every day, and now had twenty sketches in her portfolio. When she finished the drawing she laid the brush down very delicately, as if it might break.
‘I envy you,’ said Frances.
‘It passes the time.’
‘I can do nothing.’
‘Oh, surely, something.’
‘Nothing coloured. Nothing that shows.’
‘Well, I daresay things that show do get one into less trouble than things that don’t. Sketching does seem safer than thinking. Do you still expect a reply from the Hall girls?’
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