by Jean Plaidy
But he took no notice of her and went on to describe the wicked things he had done in London, how he was one of the rogues who preyed upon those ladies and gentlemen in their fine clothes and carriages; and he told it so that you were on his side against the fine ladies and gentlemen, and somehow would always be on his side, whatever he did.
“You, my dear Miss Masterman, can have no conception of the extravagances of our pleasure gardens.” Then he talked of Ranelagh and Vauxhall, and she saw the pleasure gardens and she walked in the avenues with him, she watched the fireworks and she was at the concert, and it was the most exciting time she had ever known. She drank hot punch and syllabub and shared oysters with this man, and Mr. Handel’s music and Mr. Mozart’s music was the background of the scene, for now and then he would burst into song.
He drank a good deal, and he told her then of how on out occasion at Vauxhall he had stolen the purse of a fine lady who had gone there to meet her lover. She dared not raise a hue and cry because it must not be known that she had gone there to meet her lover.
When he told that story, which was no more shocking than others he had told, Esther got up from the table.
“You are devilish I’ she said, and burst into tears. And he just looked at her, cruelly, without saying anything, but Katharine could see he hated her and she hated him. She ran out of tie room, crying, which made Katharine very uncomfortable at first, but the other children hardly seemed to notice, and guessing that the reason they did not was because they had seen it happen many times before, she did not care either; for after all, she would care only on their account, and if they did not, where was the sense in her doing so? She was rather glad Esther had gone; she had tried to spoil the fun anyway. They could be more rollickingly gay without her.
When the meal was over, they sat on, talking. Darkness had come and lamps were lighted. Then Elizabeth’s mother came in and took the child away; she was a comely girl with a fat, stupid face, and the man Marcus kissed the little girl tenderly and the servant girl lightly, which seemed a very extraordinary thing to do, but none of the others appeared to think so. She tried to imagine Papa’s kissing Poll or Amy. It was quite impossible!
They gathered round the table when it had been cleared of the food; two tame dingoes stretched themselves out on the floor.
Then Marcus took a map and spread it on the table, and she and Henry pored over it with him. There was Sydney, a big black dot, and there was the coast and the sea, and Port Jackson and Botany Bay … and then, all furry looking, like a great caterpillar, wound the Blue Mountains. And beyond the Blue Mountains was a blank space.
Oh, it was wonderful to lean over that table and to see his face with its wrinkled skin and merry blue eyes in the lamplight, to be there ..” one of them … to listen to him as he talked and pointed with his finger at the places, now and then throwing out a word for her alone.
“What do you think, Miss Masterman?”
“Do you not think so?” As though she were not only a grownup but an explorer. She knew now why Henry adored him; she was not disappointed in him now. Once she cut into the most exciting conversation to say: “May I come here again? May I come often?” And he did not reprove her for interrupting; he seemed glad that she had interrupted, for he stretched out a hand quickly and gripped hers so that it hurt. He said: “Come as often as you like, Miss Masterman. Or perhaps I may call you Katharine…”
He talked of how he and others had tried to cross the mountains; how they had hacked away at the brushwood, how they had camped in deep gullies, how they had followed what they had thought might prove to be a way over the mountains, only to be disappointed. He told of dwindling stores, of the necessity for return, of weariness, and cold and heat, and sleeplessness.
They adored him because at one moment he was a child with them, delighting in the things that delight children, and the next he was a man, and they man and woman with him.
The woman spoilt it all by putting her curly head round the door and saying: “It is time Henry went to bed; it is time she did too.”
And strangely enough he did not protest, but folded up the map, and the lovely evening was over.
Katharine had a little room with a narrow bed in it, a basin and jug and a washstand and chest of drawers. The woman lent her a nightgown, and when she brought it in, Katharine could see that she had been crying. But Katharine was too tired to think much of her, and was soon asleep; and when she awakened in the morning, remembered where she was with a delicious sense of excitement. She washed hastily and went downstairs to find Marcus on the veranda, where the fat servant brought her bread and milk.
Marcus said: “We will ride back to Sydney as soon as you are ready.” He seemed less happy than he had been last night, wistful and very sorry that she was going. When she had finished her bread and milk, and Had eaten newly baked cakes, and drunk coffee, he said very earnestly: “I hope you will come again. It is not such a long ride out from Sydney, if you know the direct way to come. You must watch as we ride back, and take note of best way to come.”
“Thank you very much!”
“You are not sorry you were lost?”
“No, I am glad. I have loved it. I shall certainly come again..” often. May I come often ?”
“It could not be too often for me.”
“I am glad you like me.”
“Does that mean you like me?”
“You are different from other people.”
“Different from your father?”
“Oh, yes! Very different from him.”
“Yet you do not dislike me? You must be very fond of him.”
“Why, yes. He is very clever, you know. And very important.”
“And he amuses you… as I did last night?”
“Oh … Papa is not like that. He does not talk… very mud Except about the First Fleet and Mr. Bass and Mr. Flinders… and then only a little. He does not talk like you do.”
“And you liked the way I talked, did you not?” She was puzzled. She did not know what he wanted her to say, but had stopped thinking solely about him because her thoughts had switched to Papa and Mamma. She hoped they had not been frightened.
She said: “He is the best father in the world.”
“How do you know?” he said, just like Martin might have said Mamma says so.”
Then he dropped the subject, and she was glad.
She said goodbye to Henry, who intimated very definitely that she must come again. She said goodbye to Esther and Mr. Blake ‘ and all the children. Then she rode back with Marcus.
He talked fascinatingly as they rode, pointing out landmarks; he explained the difference in the grasses and the trees, and compared them with those of the Old Country. He sang songs he had known in the Old Country, and she was sorry when they came into Sydney.
Mamma came out into the yard. She was very white, and there were dark shadows under her eyes, and she stared at them as though they were ghosts.
“Hello, Mamma!” she called uneasily.
“I was lost.”
“Katharine!” said Carolan stonily, looking at the man. Katharine slipped off her horse; she stood there holding the bridle nervously.
Marcus said: “Carolan, your little daughter was rescued by my son. Do you not think that a rather charming sequel to … everything?”
Mamma called to one of the men to take Katharine’s horse. Mamma was white and haughty. Margery appeared; she had been crying. She screamed out when she saw Katharine: “Oh, my little love! My own little love!” And Katherine, frightened for some reason of which she was only partly aware, ran to Margery as if for protection, and Margery knelt on the stones of the yard and put her arms about her.
“Scared out of me wits, lovey. Why, you scared me out of me natural… Why, whatever was you up to?”
“I was lost, and Henry found me. and…” Margery’s body had gone taut; she was no longer thinking of Katharine; she was staring over Katharine’s head at Marcus.
Papa a
ppeared. His face shone with sudden joy when he saw Katharine, and Katharine knew then that they had had no message, and had been very frightened.
She ran to Papa; he lifted her up; she kissed him and went on kissing to try to explain by kisses that she would rather have given up her exciting evening than that he and Mamma should be worried like this.
Then Mamma turned her head and said: “It is all right now. She was lost. This… gentleman brought her home.”
Papa hugged Katharine and said: “Bring him in! Bring him in!”
They went into the house, and when they were inside. Mamma took Katharine from Papa’s arms, and her eyes were cold and very angry.
“Go to your room at once, Katharine!” she said, and her voice was like ice, and sharp like the edge of a knife; and Katharine went in shame because she knew she ought to have insisted on coming home, and that Esther had been right; that that jaunty, exciting, lovely man Marcus had not kept his word about sending a message.
She went to her room and waited there, feeling that something awful was going to happen. It was not very long before she heard Marcus ride away. She hoped they had been nice to him, for he had been very nice to her. She hoped they had given him refreshment; it would be awful if Mamma were not nice to him just because he had forgotten to send that message.
James and Martin came in.
“Where have you been?” demanded James.
“I was lost.” What a glorious account of her adventure she had imagined herself giving James. And now she had nothing to say except “I was lost.” which they knew already.
“We had a search party I’ cried James excitedly.
“Lanthorns and flaming torches!” screeched Martin.
“We thought you’d been murdered, you see,” said James cheerfully.
“I might have been,” she said.
“Yes,” said James with unnecessary melancholy, ‘but you weren’t.”
Miss Kelly came in.
“I wonder you’re not ashamed,” she said.
“I never saw such a fuss. I think what you deserve is a thorough good whipping.”
Miss Kelly bustled the boys out and turned the key in the lock.
It was some time before Mamma came in. Katharine threw herself against her.
“Mammal Why am I locked up here? It wasn’t my fault; I was lost … Anybody might get lost… And then I heard Henry’s horse. It was exciting; I coo-eed and he coo-eed, and then he came and took me to his home.”
“Yes?” said Mamma in an odd, stony voice.
“And then it was such fun, Mamma. Oh, he has been everywhere. And he told us, Mamma. He told us all about it. All about London and the Old Country. He talks differently from anyone else different from Margery or Papa, or even you. He tells you things, and you see them, and oh. Mamma, don’t you like him?
Can he come here? He would like to. It’s nicer here than there … and I think they quarrel a lot. She looks at him as if she hates him. and he doesn’t care a bit when she cries, and he kisses the servant, and there’s an Elizabeth. Henry says he’s got half-brothers and sisters. Henry’s nice. Oh. Mamma, can they come?”
“Really, Katharine, I haven’t the faintest notion of what you’re saying. You are most incoherent. And it was very, very naughty of you to go off like that; and I am going to punish you for being so thoughtless. Your father and I were very worried.”
“Oh, but Mamma, the man came. She said you would be worried; he said he would send a man to tell you where I was.”
“Who is she?”
The one they call Esther.”
“Esther.” said Mamma faintly. And then: “Of course, no man was sent.”
“Oh. but he said …”. “He is a liar,” said Mamma.
“Oh, but Mamma, I’m sure there is a mistake. I know he said I must ask him…”
“He has gone now.”
“I am going there again, Mamma. They asked me. He and Henry said I must go again.”
“You will never see them again,” said Mamma. Katharine was incredulous. She could find nothing to say.
“And,” said Mamma, ‘you will stay here for the rest of the day alone.”
Mamma went out then. She had been pale, but now her face was flushed, her eyes hard as the glittering stones in the pendant she wore round her neck.
Katharine heard the key turn in the lock. She was angry with Mamma, angry with Papa even, poor Papa who had done nothing but be very pleased because she was home again. Still, she was angry with the whole world, for more than anything she wanted to see Marcus and Henry again.
“And I will!” she said. She went over to the Bible on the chest of drawers, the Bible which Miss Kelly had given her last Christmas. She laid her hands on it and swore as she did when she and James played Judge and Prisoners. But there was no jest this; it was a solemn vow.
“With God’s help, so I will,” she said. Her eyes were resolute, her mind made up.
Carolan was dressing for her dinner-party. It was a very important dinner-party, a sort of coming out for Katharine. She was seventeen. Carolan’s thoughts must go back to a similar occasion nearly twenty years ago, when she was going to her first ball. A green dress she had worn; she was wearing a green dress now. How different though, this rather plump and still beautiful woman, poised and confident, the mother of five sons and one daughter, Mrs. Masterman of Sydney. How different from that slender girl who had gone down to the hall at Haredon to dance with Everard.
Audrey, her maid, was ready to do her hair. Audrey’s eyes, meeting hers in the mirror, sparkled with admiration. She had rescued Audrey from the kitchen, much as Lucille had rea her all those years ago, and the girl was her willing slave. _. could hardly remember now what Lucille had looked like, and yet the memory of her was as evergreen as the fir trees which had grown so abundantly in the damp climate of Haredon. There was everything to remind her in this house. Why did they not leave it? Simply because together they never broached the subject; they dared not. If she said to Gunnar: “Let us leave this house,” he would know she was thinking of Lucille. And what they had been trying to do all the time, all through those eighteen years, was to show each other, without mentioning the subject, that neither of them ever thought of Lucille.
It was a ridiculous pretence; she knew he thought of her often. She knew the shadow of his first wife lay heavy across the happiness he might have enjoyed with his second.
Audrey said: “Pearls, Madam?” And she smiled her assent. He: smile was charming as it ever was. She always tried to be charming to the servants, particularly if they had been convicts. Behind each of them she would see a grim shadow of Newgate that could make hideous memories rush back at her, and whatever had been their crime, she would make excuses for them. Of Audrey she knew little except that she was sentenced to transportation for fourteen years, and had, by all accounts, been a desperate creature. And yet here was Audrey, almost gentle, pliable, eager to please. She never asked questions of Audrey; it occurred to her that the girl might not wish to talk, but because there was a daintiness about her which most lacked, she had taken her to be her maid, and Audrey was grateful.
“Audrey clasped the pearls about her neck and stood back to admire.
They are lovely, Madam.”
A gift from Gunnar one of his many gifts. She was fond of him, though at times he irritated her almost beyond endurance. His ideas were so conventional that they bored her; she knew, almost to the phrase, what he would say on almost any subject. His conduct was absolutely what it should have been except on one occasion; and how ironical it was that her tenderness for him should be just because of that lapse.
She smiled faintly at her reflection in the mirror. Ripe womanhood, full sensuous lips, and green eyes that flashed from mood to mood with a speed that could be disastrous. She was her mother’s daughter; she belonged to that procession of women to whom numerous love-affairs were as natural as eating and drinking. But there was a certain strength in her which the others had lacked; perha
ps it had grown up in the evil soil of Newgate, because that fetid air had nourished it. A glance from a pair of merry eyes, admiring, passionate and she was as ready for adventure as her mother had been. But she had resisted every time, for she could not forget that her husband had jeopardized not only his soul but and ironical as it might seem, this was of almost as great importance to him his position here in Sydney, for love of her.
Gunnar was really a man after Lachlan Macquarie’s own heart, and but for that eighteen-year-old scandal, what position might not Gunnar have held under the greatest governor New South Wales had ever known! Macquarie and his saintly Elizabeth had not been ruling when it happened, but there were those only too ready to tell him the story which they had preserved, as though it was something precious, through the reign of turbulent Bligh and the period of usurpation that followed before the coming of Macquarie. Gunnar admired the governor almost to idolatry; and the governor admired Gunnar; but that was that ancient scandal that had attached itself to poor Gunnar and dragged him down from the heights which, but for it, he would certainly have attained. It was not the fact that he had married a convict; it was the circumstances in which he had married her. There were many convicts, and once they were free it should not be remembered against them that they had suffered transportation. Everyone knew that the laws of the old Country, and its conditions, were such as to breed convicts. A convict can become a respectable man in a new country many of them had for that reckless daring which may have driven them to crime, turned to good effect, can be the very quality needed to found a new nation. No, the fact that Mrs. Masterman had begun her life in Sydney as a convict was not really as important as that clinging scandal about Masterman’s first wife.
And here I am, back at it, thought Carolan. Eighteen years ago it happened, and I still think of it as though it were yesterday.
Tonight was Katharine’s party, a joyous occasion. Katharine! Sweet daughter. Anything was surely worth while to have had Katharine. Five sons she had borne Gunnar, willingly doing her duty one pregnancy following close on another accepting the discomfort, the pain and the danger; and all because she was determined to do her duty, to give him those sons he had wanted. He had got them; he had paid dearly for them, and he should not be disappointed. Queer, that it should be Katharine whom they loved best of all. The daughter; and every time he looked at her, did he think as she did of those months immediately previous to her birth? Was it that that made her specially dear? No, not It was the charm of Katharine; the sweetness of her. Carolan’s daughter. Her eyes had lost that tinge of green, and were blue as speedwells you found in the lanes of the Old Country; her hair was a deeper shade of red; her chin determined as Carolan’s had been twenty years ago, so that one was fearful for Katherine. The boys were like their father calmer, assured; they possessed humour, though Gunnar had none, but that would not hinder their way of life. She could see them, years ahead, important men in the town, of perhaps in other towns, perhaps back in England. Martin and Edward both had a yearning for England. James would most likely take over his father’s activities; and it was too soon to see what little Joseph and Stephen were going to do. The boys were safe, but Katharine she was not so sure. Gunnar had wanted her educated in England; he had advanced ideas on education for such an unimaginative man. James was soon to leave for England, but Katharine she would not allow to go.