‘There are three cases of fever at the Eagle Farm.’
‘And another here. The summer is upon us. What’s that? Letters.’
He laughed when he saw the handwriting on his letters. ‘I am popular. My stepmama also writes.’ He put the letters aside unopened. ‘What news of transport for the family?’
‘The Phillip and the Isabella.’
‘Honours are coming fast for all. And in two ships there are likely to be horses. I hope so, Murray, for your sake. Above all things, I should hate to see you on that bullock cart.’
‘You won’t, Cowper.’
‘No, my dear fellow. Not if there are fresh horses.’
‘Or even if there are not. I go to Sydney in the Phillip.’
‘You?’
‘To attend Mrs Logan. So, Cowper—’ Murray let his satisfaction shine forth at last—‘it won’t be me that goes on that bullock cart.’
Henry stared for a while into the young man’s face, then burst into laughter. He threw himself back in his chair, helplessly laughing, slowly slapping his chest with a hand.
Murray looked a little angry. Why had it not occurred to him that Cowper would not care—not one jot!—who saw him on the bullock cart?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
All the administrative people agreed that the dispatch of the two ships, and the governor’s plans for the funeral, augured well for the widow’s future. ‘She is bound to get a civil pension,’ Clunie told Edwards. ‘But it’s as well to be cautious, and not to tell her so. I don’t.’
‘Mrs Bulwer does,’ said Edwards.
‘Mrs Bulwer is a soothsayer. She knows the exact route of the funeral, and the names of all who will attend.’
‘And that the archdeacon is to officiate.’
‘Well, he will, you know.’
The ships were expected daily. Captain Clunie found himself glancing often at the signalling station on the hill. He believed his wife would have reached Sydney, and that one of the two ships would bring him her first letter written in the colony. On visits to the commandant’s house he cast surreptitious but calculating glances about the rooms, wondering where she would put this or that piece of furniture. He had become reconciled to her extravagance both by the discomfort and bleakness of the house, and by the longings that filled him in knowing her so near. She was not yet thirty, and they had been much separated; he hoped that during his term as commandant they would have children at last.
After a wait of only five days the signal from the Governor Phillip was received. Clunie had the Regent Bird made ready at once, and set out for Dunwich, leaving Edwards to take the news to Mrs Logan. Edwards had finished his report to Colonel Allen only the night before. ‘I am not much of a hand at reports,’ he told Letty, ‘but I pride myself it’s pretty clear. I conferred with Collison and that fellow Lazarus, then put it down as I would write a journal.’
‘Will Lazarus go back to England?’ asked Robert.
‘I should hope not!’ said Edwards, smiling in adult conspiracy at Letty and Frances.
‘But he came from there,’ said Robert.
‘Has he a mama?’ asked Lucy.
‘Be quiet, Lucy,’ said Robert. He turned again to Edwards. ‘But he is to be pardoned for bringing in papa’s body, so why should he not go back there?’
‘Because he has forfeited his right to live there,’ said Edwards reasonably.
‘He has lost his wight to live in England,’ translated Letty, ‘because he has been bad.’
‘Only good people live in England,’ said Lucy with satisfaction.
‘If only that were so!’ said Edwards, with a droll look at Letty and Frances. Both smiled absently. They were working on a black dress—Letty tucking the bodice, and Frances hemming the seams of the skirt—so that Letty might arrive at Sydney correctly dressed.
Robert turned abruptly away from the conversation and climbed up on a chair. His leg was quite healed. When he jumped with a thud to the floor, Lucy climbed on a second chair and also jumped. When both had jumped several times, Edwards sent them an irritated look, and Letty told them sharply to stop, and that she couldn’t hear a word Lieutenant Edwards was saying. Obediently both left their chairs and came to loll about their mother and aunt. Presently there was a break in the conversation. ‘Will Lazarus live in Sydney?’ asked Robert.
‘If he pleases,’ replied Edwards.
‘His mama is in Sydney,’ decided Lucy.
Edwards gave his pleasant easy laugh. ‘If he has one, she most likely is. But he’s a handy fellow, all the same. He says he will cut cedar in the south, and in a few years will buy a bullock team.’
‘So many,’ said Letty, with a sigh, ‘acquire wiches.’
‘Will he come with us in the Phillip?’ asked Robert.
‘No,’ said Edwards. ‘Captain Clunie has recommended—has written, and asked the governor to remit—to pardon him. But first his case must be considered.’
Frances lowered her sewing to her lap. ‘Does that take long?’
‘I have heard of it taking a year. You see,’ said Edwards, laughing as he rose to his feet, ‘it is very often like this business of the horses.’
‘It is easy for them to acquire wiches,’ said Letty dreamily. ‘No duty impedes them. But he wejected a pwofitable civil post, in order to stay here as commandant.’
Edwards bowed very low. Frances lifted the black cloth and began to sew again.
The Isabella had joined the Governor Phillip while Clunie was on his way down the river. He arrived back at the settlement on the following morning. Louisa and Amelia, when they went to the office at noon to collect their mail from Whyte, went on to knock at the door of the inner office, so that they might ask for news of his wife. Liberties were possible with Clunie that would never have been thought of with Logan.
‘She is well and cheerful,’ said Clunie, looking soberly up from his papers, ‘and expects to be here in a fortnight.’
‘He does not appear well and cheerful,’ said Amelia when they were outside in the garden.
‘I expect it’s because there are no horses.’
They went to the house, where they were to help with the last of the packing, and with finishing the black dress. There was nothing now to hinder the departure. The family, with Elizabeth Robertson and James Murray, were to embark on the Regent Bird at first light, but before then, by torchlight, the coffin was to be put aboard the Glory.
‘Our good captain is in a deep dump,’ Amelia told Letty, as she took off her bonnet.
‘I observed it. He told me he had a vewy burdensome official mail. Look, here is a letter from Mrs Anning. She sends a most pwessing invitation for us all to stay at their Sydney house. Her nephew will be at the wharf to meet the Phillip.’
‘What it is to have good friends!’ cried Amelia, raising her hands and rolling her eyes.
In the office in the garden, Clunie was reading again the part of Macleay’s letter that weighed most upon him. The heaviest awful sentence having been pronounced on Bulbridge and Fagan (wrote Macleay), it had been decided that it should be carried out publicly on the settlement, it being thought very desirable that the other prisoners should be informed of the impracticability of the attempt to escape, by them that had made it. Clunie was therefore requested to have erected . . .
In the house, the gardeners pick up the last of the boxes and crates to carry them to the Regent Bird. Such weight in the handcart creating too much impetus on the steep garden paths, they hoist them on to their shoulders. Clunie, who has begun his reply to Macleay, hears their heavy, uneven footsteps passing his office as he writes.
‘. . . would suggest that the gallows required should be erected in the yard of the prisoners’ barracks, and the prisoners assembled at that place, when the sentence on the two condemned men
is carried out.’
By the time the gardeners return for another load, he has finished that part of his reply. He dips his pen, settles in his chair, and goes on, very deliberately, with the next.
‘I take this opportunity of stating that there is not now a single horse of any description on the settlement, and from the extent of the different establishments, and the distance of some of the grazing grounds . . .’
The footsteps pass and repass. He decides that he will not even attempt to reply to his wife’s letter until the evening. In any reply he might make at present, she is certain to detect the heaviness of his spirits. He knows that his spirits will have risen by this evening, for already he is more resigned to the event. He has asked that a hangman be sent from Sydney, so it may at least be hoped that the matter will not be bungled. Regrettably, men must be hanged somewhere, and since it has fallen to his lot to arrange the business, it is hardly his place to shirk it. The wall around the barracks yard is not high enough to hide the top of the gallows, but the two men need not be left hanging long, nor be seen from the commandant’s house. The house, thank God, is at a decent distance. This evening, he will call on Mrs Harbin and ask that she release Madge Noakes. He has noticed that since her departure the dust has collected in corners, and on sills and panes of glass. In the morning, directly the Regent Bird has sailed, the cleaning and burnishing would begin.
The gardeners’ footsteps no longer pass the office. All that is left in the house of the family’s belongings are the garments they are wearing, and the clothes and toilet articles that will be packed into baskets in the morning. When the gardeners have gone, and there is nothing left to do except the hem of the black dress (which Amelia is doing), Letty sits suddenly in one of the big plain cedar chairs.
‘Something will happen to pwevent us leaving.’
‘It can’t!’ cries Robert.
‘My dear Letty!’ says Louisa, with a touch of impatience.
‘My love,’ asks Amelia, sewing as she speaks, ‘what can possibly happen?’
‘The two biggest ships in the world,’ Lucy reminds her mother.
‘Not in the world,’ says Robert.
But Letty, as if she has heard nothing of all this, shakes her head. ‘At the vewy last minute, something will pwevent us.’
Frances is in her room. ‘I think it very unlikely,’ she says to the children, who have run to her for information. She is sitting on the edge of the narrow cot provided for this last night, and is pondering the mail brought by the Governor Phillip. She holds two letters, one from her sisters, the other from Edmund Joyce. Hermione and Lydia write that their Uncle Fitz brought a friend to the house. He told the girls he brought him expressly to see them. The name of the friend was Becket, but Hermione would address him only as Mr Bucket, and upon leaving the room, they both almost died of laughter. Mr Bucket looked at Hermione as if she were eighteen instead of thirteen, and at Lydia as if she were sixteen instead of twelve. No doubt he also mistook calves for cows, and if he came again, Hermione would ask him if he had ever milked one.
Edmund’s letter is simply a brief cry of rejoicing that they are to meet so soon. The children have climbed on to her cot and are bounding about on the mattress. ‘You are very unruly,’ she tells them. She feels that she has too many conflicting duties, too many options. But since this is so, the sooner she launches herself among them, the better. She is impatient to leave.
‘Mama says it will happen at the very last minute,’ says Robert.
She folds the letters and puts them in her apron pocket. ‘Mama is sad, and when we are sad we have such thoughts. Nothing will happen.’
All went well with their departure. At dawn they left the house and walked to the stone wharf. The Glory had already taken on the lead coffin and had put into the stream. Frances, who was in advance of the others, caught a glimpse of her as she rounded the first bend, but she was then distracted by Gilligan throwing the stump of his torch in the water, and when she looked again, the Glory was not to be seen.
Farewells had taken place the night before, but Captain Clunie was on the wharf, and so were Louisa and Amelia. There was a fair wind, and the Regent Bird got away well. Captain Clunie took off his cap, waved it, and walked briskly away. The bell had begun to toll for the morning muster. Louisa and Amelia turned away without waving, and departed at a stroll. They were to wave from the botanical gardens, and had plenty of time to make their way across the promontory. Their easiest way was through the commandant’s garden, and as they passed the house they could hear the knock of brooms and the clanking of buckets. The drawing room window was thrown up as they passed on the path beyond the verandah, and for a moment they saw Madge Noakes’s face, flanked by thick brown arms still raised to push up the window; but either she did not see them, or was too busy to bother.
In the botanical gardens, they stood beneath the fig trees and waved long scarves, while the passengers on the Regent Bird waved handkerchiefs, scarves, and hats in response. Amelia and Louisa, experienced in farewells, did not sustain it for too long, but turned away after a few minutes.
From the side of the cutter, Frances watched them as they walked up the hill. The yellow line of prisoners was filing down from the crest, and for a few minutes it looked as if they must meet, but from the long line, group after group broke away and moved into the various plantations, until at last Amelia and Louisa, strolling, trailing their skirts, were alone on the path.
Frances had looked for the Glory as they sailed into the gardens reach, but she had disappeared. When the Regent Bird rounded the next bend, Frances expected again to see her, but again saw only unoccupied water. Robert was also watching for her. ‘Where is the Glory?’ he asked at last.
‘Far off by now,’ said Murray.
‘No,’ said Frances. ‘I saw her as we embarked.’
They passed the wheatfield, where the wheat was now so high that the prisoners could be seen only as a yellow ribbon moving behind those thousands of green strokes toppled slightly from the vertical. The wheat muffled, just a little, the sound of their irons and chains. Letty and Lucy were already feeling queasy, and went below with Elizabeth and Murray to attend them. The Regent Bird negotiated the next bend, and there, in the long reach that led with only the gentlest of curves to the bay, Frances and Robert caught their first full sight of the Glory.
She was sailing easily and lightly, and on her stern deck stood Collison. Down below she also carried six prisoners, who were to be released in Sydney, but when Frances saw Robert’s devout and glowing face, she knew that she would say nothing to him about the prisoners, and indeed, she was glad that the Glory was making good speed, and would draw far enough ahead to allow them to be taken off before the Regent Bird came up with her at Dunwich.
They kept her in sight during all the long journey to the mouth of the river, not losing her even when she passed behind an island. The island was so small, and the trees upon it so slender, that the trees themselves seemed to pass one by one across her length. They lost her when she made the south-east turn into the bay, but saw her again, travelling at a greater distance than before, just after the Regent Bird made the same turn. A cold gusty salt wind was chopping at the surface of the bay. Frances went below, where Murray was now ministering to Elizabeth as well, and fetched two shawls and a basket of food.
Huddled into shawls, they ate cheese, dried figs, and bread. Murray came up on deck for air, and stayed to talk and share their food. A sailor rushed past, and another sailor came and talked to Robert. But the Glory was too distant to show signs of any such activity; and Frances, watching Robert’s face, wondered if to him she appeared to be sailing unaided, and to be unoccupied except for the coffin which he knew to be in her, and the soldier whose red coat was distinct even at that distance. She supposed that Robert would never think of his father without the image springing to his mind of a lead coffin, honour
ably attended, in a small boat struggling through the furrows of a rough sunlit bay. She did not know that for her, too, this image was already beginning to take precedence over the cold-faced soldier descending the rough incline, and over all those others that had interposed between that, the first, and this, the last. Because she was not ignorant of the ballast of men in the Glory, it would not obliterate those others, but would succeed, at last, in gaining a little mercy for them.
For reading group notes visit textclassics.com.au
The Commandant
Jessica Anderson
Introduced by Carmen Callil
Homesickness
Murray Bail
Introduced by Peter Conrad
Sydney Bridge Upside Down
David Ballantyne
Introduced by Kate De Goldi
A Difficult Young Man
Martin Boyd
Introduced by Sonya Hartnett
The Australian Ugliness
Robin Boyd
Introduced by Christos Tsiolkas
The Even More Complete
Book of Australian Verse
John Clarke
Introduced by John Clarke
Diary of a Bad Year
JM Coetzee
Introduced by Peter Goldsworthy
Wake in Fright
Kenneth Cook
Introduced by Peter Temple
The Dying Trade
Peter Corris
Introduced by Charles Waterstreet
They’re a Weird Mob
Nino Culotta
Introduced by Jacinta Tynan
Careful, He Might Hear You
Sumner Locke Elliott
Introduced by Robyn Nevin
Terra Australis
Matthew Flinders
Introduced by Tim Flannery
My Brilliant Career
Miles Franklin
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Cosmo Cosmolino
The Commandant Page 33