Solomon's Song

by Bryce Courtenay

  Mary lifts her hand. Even though she is in bed, she still wears mittens to hide the deformity of her hands, they are as indispensable to her as her lace sleeping bonnet. ‘No, I don’t want him fussing about. Will you call Hinetitama and the children to my bedside but first . . .’

  Hawk interjects. ‘Mama, you are never taken sick, please let me call Dr Moses.’

  Mary doesn’t bother to answer. ‘Hawk, listen to me,’ she says, her voice barely above a whisper. She pats the eiderdown beside her, signalling that he should sit beside her on the bed. As Hawk sits, the weight of his huge body sinks the bedsprings, so that Mary is almost in a seated position. ‘Now listen to me carefully,’ she repeats. ‘In the safe in my office is a brown manilla envelope, it’s got a black seal, not red like the usual. Open it, read it carefully.’ She pauses to take a breath.

  ‘Then in the drawer of the desk you will find a stick of the same black wax. I want you to reseal it, so it’s returned just the way it was.’ The effort at talking is taking its toll and Mary rests for a moment, her chest heaving with the effort. ‘If the Dutchman behaves well, you will give it to him before you die, or leave it to him in your will.’ Mary rests again before continuing. ‘If he plays up after I’ve gorn, tell him you now possess the document and send him away. Tell him if he returns you will take the appropriate action.’

  ‘Mama, hush, hush, you’re not going to die,’ Hawk says, alarmed, putting his huge black hand to her brow. It is cold and clammy and his heart skips a beat.

  There is a trace of a smile on Mary’s lips. ‘Yes I am. If I says so, that’s it then, ain’t it? Do you understand what I’m saying about the Dutchman?’

  Hawk nods. ‘Yes, Mama.’

  ‘Now call Hinetitama and the children in.’

  ‘Mama, I feel I should call Dr Moses.’

  Mary sighs and then remains silent for a few moments as though she is trying to decide. ‘No,’ she says finally, ‘I’ve had enough, I heard the birds pass over this mornin’ but I weren’t there to see them.’ It is said as though it is her final word, no different to her dismissal of some proposition put to her in business. ‘Go now.’

  Hawk taps softly on the door of Hinetitama’s bed chamber then opens the door a crack to look in. She is awake but still in bed beside her husband, who is snoring, his fat belly rising and falling well above the level of his head and the bolster it rests against.

  In the years they have been together Teekleman has almost doubled in size, his girth well beyond the possibility of joining his fingers about it. Hawk opens the door a little wider so that his niece might see his face. ‘You decent?’ he whispers.

  ‘What is it?’ she asks, climbing out of bed. She is wearing a cotton nightgown to her ankles and her dark hair falls naturally to her shoulders, seeming not disturbed by her sleeping. Hawk thinks how pretty she looks, though a woman now of thirty-two she still appears to be ten years younger. He wonders, as he has so often done, what she sees in the fat Dutchman, for she seems as besotted by him as ever.

  Hawk points to Teekleman and brings his finger to his lips. ‘Come to Mary’s room,’ he says softly and then goes to fetch Ben and Victoria from the nursery.

  With Teekleman excluded and the remainder of her little family gathered around her, Mary first kisses Ben and sends him off to his breakfast. She holds Victoria a moment longer. ‘You shall have my abacus, my precious,’ she whispers before releasing her.

  ‘Are you ill, Great-grandmamma?’ Victoria asks in the clear tones of a child. ‘Are you going to die?’

  ‘Run along now, darlin’,’ Mary says softly.

  ‘No! I won’t and you can’t make me,’ the child replies, looking defiantly at Mary.

  ‘Go!’ Hinetitama admonishes her. ‘Do as Great-grandmamma says.’

  ‘No!’ Victoria replies, folding her little arms and walking backwards until her bottom brushes against a small chaise longue and she jumps up and wriggles, with her arms still folded, until she is seated defiantly upon it. She hasn’t, for one moment, taken her eyes off Mary.

  ‘Stubborn,’ Mary whispers, though it seems more a compliment than an admonishment. Then with a slight gesture of her hand she draws Hinetitama closer so that she is where Hawk previously sat. ‘I have made provision in my will for you and the children, my dear. You are to have your own house with servants provided and the income from a trust fund I have set up for the children until Victoria reaches the age of thirty and Ben thirty-two.’

  Hinetitama does not appear to grasp what the old woman is saying. ‘Grandmother, please don’t die,’ she cries and bursts into sobs.

  Victoria watches Hinetitama crying. ‘She can die if she wants to,’ she says suddenly to her mother. Then she turns to Mary and announces, ‘Great-grandmamma, we don’t want you to die, but if you must, then you simply must.’

  Mary, increasingly short of breath, still manages a wan smile. She looks up at Hawk. ‘She’s the one,’ she whispers. She lies still for a while then turns to the weeping Hinetitama, ‘Now, now, girlie, enough o’ that nonsense. Listen to me, I shan’t say it again. You shall have the income from the trust fund I have set up for Ben and Victoria, it will take at least until they are thirty years old to learn enough to take over from Hawk. Then they shall each inherit fifty per cent of the trust and you will receive a separate pension.’ Mary rests a while, her chest rising and falling in short sharp bursts. ‘The principal is not your money. Only the interest may be used by you and your husband, that is, until they reach the age to inherit,’ she repeats. ‘Does yer understand?’

  Hinetitama, who has her chin on her breast, nods. ‘Yes, Grandmother,’ she sniffs, though it is unclear whether she does.

  ‘Now I want you to do something for me,’ Mary says, reaching for her granddaughter’s hand.

  ‘Anything, Grandmother,’ Hinetitama sniffs.

  ‘Will you sing me that song?’

  ‘What song?’ Hinetitama sobs.

  ‘The Maori one, child, about goin’ away.’

  Mary nods and Hinetitama suddenly breaks into uncontrollable sobbing. ‘Come, come,’ Mary whispers. ‘None o’ that, girl.’

  Hinetitama struggles to regain her composure then begins to sing, her voice soft and reedy at first but her lovely contralto gains the ascendancy and a beautiful, haunting melody rises deep and strong.

  Hinetitama comes to the end and Mary lifts her arms and hugs her granddaughter perhaps for the second or third time in her life. ‘I am most proud of you, Hinetitama, most proud, thank you for my heirs, for Ben and Victoria.’ She pauses, then says gently, ‘Now you must go, I wish to be alone with Hawk.’ Mary turns slowly to Victoria. ‘Run along, my precious.’

  Victoria jumps from the couch, her small feet landing together with a soft thump on the Persian carpet. She walks the few steps over to Mary’s bed and, standing on tiptoe, she kisses her on the forehead, then takes her weeping mother by the hand. ‘Come along, Mother,’ she commands, leading the sobbing Hinetitama from the room.

  Hawk waits until they’ve left before he resumes his place beside Mary. ‘You will keep all the servants,’ she instructs, ‘they’s all of them strays and ain’t got no family and nowhere to go, they must have pensions when they are too old to work.’ Then she places her hand in Hawk’s huge paw. ‘I loves you Hawk, I always loved you the most.’ Hawk remains quiet, though great tears run down his black cheeks and splash between the cleavage of his dressing gown and onto his dark chest.

  After a while Mary asks him to help her up to a sitting position. Hawk does so, plumping and propping the cushions behind her. She leans slightly forward. ‘Take it off,’ she says slowly. Hawk sees that her Waterloo medal hangs from her neck on its gold chain. ‘Keep it for Victoria, give it to her when she comes of age. Tell her how it come about, that it’s luck beyond good luck, much, much more, it’s her great good fortune.’

  Hawk wipes his tears on the sleeve of his dressing gown and reaches over and slips the chain over Mary’s head. ‘Mama,
I will tell her what it meant to you.’

  ‘Tell her about the birds, the rosellas,’ Mary says, now almost breathless.

  She is silent for almost half an hour and Hawk regains his composure. Every once in a while he can feel pressure from the hand he holds, as though she is about to speak, as though she is gathering her final strength. Then with what must have taken an enormous effort of will, she suddenly sits bolt upright. ‘Don’t trust the bastard,’ she shouts. ‘Don’t never trust him, yer hear!’ Mary, exhausted, collapses back into her pillow.

  ‘Who, Teekleman?’ Hawk says scornfully. ‘I never did, Mama.’

  Mary’s eyes open in alarm. ‘No! Not him, David, David Solomon!’ With this last great effort she closes her eyes and appears to fall asleep.

  Around the middle of the afternoon she wakes, though she seems weaker still, barely able to talk. Hawk has sent for Ann Solomon, Ikey’s youngest daughter, who at sixteen had left Hannah to be with her father and who has since been cared for by Mary, lacking for nothing and now on a generous pension for the remainder of her life. Ann says her tearful farewells to Mary, of whom she has always been most fond. After her departure Mary calls for Hawk and soon afterwards, with her hand clasped in his, she loses consciousness. Just on sunset, she sighs softly and passes away. Mary has achieved in death what she’d always done in life, gone about things without too much fuss and carry-on.

  Hinetitama and the servants will ever afterwards tell how upon the very moment of Mary’s death the garden is filled with flocks of emerald rosellas, their terrible screeching rending the air, so that the children and the servants run about with their hands to their ears. The small green parrots land in their many hundreds, some will later say in their tens of thousands, a huge spreading mass of bright emerald and yellow covering the entire surface of the roof and shrouding the surrounding trees and bushes in a whirring of bright feathers. They remain for a full hour, then as suddenly as they’ve arrived, they depart, leaving the air behind them so still that no one dares be the first to break the silence.

  Martha Billings, the kitchen maid, swears on her life that the following morning when she went out into the garden at sunrise, not a single rosella passed overhead. She declares ever after that the little emerald green parakeets changed their path of flight and were never again seen during her time in the big house.

  Mary’s good luck, her great good fortune, has followed her to the grave, where Hawk later speculates she will lie forever beside Hannah Solomon, quarrelling ceaselessly and giving each other what-for. Though the both of them, he knows, will take time off to lay down the law to a hapless and fervently protesting Ikey. ‘Oi vey, I must have a little peace, my dears, a portion of quietitude from your combined vexations, conniptions, quarrelsomeness and cantankery. God forbid I should live through all of eternity in the company of two such raucous and spleenful harridans!’

  Chapter Four

  HAWK , TEEKLEMAN AND

  HINETITAMA

  Hobart 1892–1893

  Mary has left everything to Hawk, that is all but the ten per cent of her fortune bequeathed to Ben and Victoria, the income from it going to Hinetitama until Victoria reaches the age of thirty and Ben thirty-two. Mary failed to explain this disparity between the two ages and no mention is made of it in the document drawing up the trust deed.

  Hawk can only assume that Mary believed Victoria was to be favoured. She’d often enough in his presence declared that Victoria was, as she put it, ‘the one’.

  Iron Mary did not believe in the God-given right of the male gender to take control, leaving the female to fetch, carry, nurture and nourish. She constantly championed a woman’s right to look to her own affairs and never relinquished any of her personal power to the opposite gender. She understood the principles of construction as well as any foreman builder and woe betide any carpenter, cooper, brickie, plumber or engineer who tried to pull the wool over her eyes. In matters of accountancy her abacus threatened any tendency to be careless and she knew her beer and its chemistry as well as any brewmaster in the land. While she left the supervision of the company’s hops and barley farms to Hawk she nevertheless could gauge the quality and price of the crops as an expert. Iron Mary’s querulous eye was everywhere to be found.

  It was this fierce sense of independence that led to her constant disparagement and often even to outright hatred. The malevolence felt towards her came not only from the business community in the colony, but also from the chattering females in its society, who saw her as having betrayed her gender. The exceptions were those who worked for Mary, who knew they were better treated and their families more secure than in any other form of employment available on the island. Iron Mary was hard, but she was also fair, there was never any ambivalence about her, you always knew where you stood.

  She had even carried the notion of female financial responsibility through to Hinetitama, though she believed her granddaughter practically incapable of counting the change in her purse. Mary made her the trustee for the children’s legacy, knowing it was a fairly harmless gesture. Hinetitama could never get her hands on the principal sum while receiving a considerable independent income from it. In her will she had written: Though you know nothing of bookkeeping, it will be good for you to be charged with this small duty in return for the income it brings you.

  Mary’s funeral proved to be one of the biggest yet to be held on the island, though it turned out to be a quite different affair to the one originally intended by Hawk. He decided to give the brewery workers a half-day holiday, informing them they were not duty bound to come to the funeral but that a picnic would be held for their families. However, the workers formed a delegation to ask if they might attend the funeral instead. It was an indication of how they felt about Mary and so Hawk turned what was to be a picnic into a wake. The servants in the big house were invited as well as those publicans and their wives who wished to be present. This was simply a gesture of goodwill, publicans and their wives are seldom included in events of most kinds.

  Hawk knew those businesses that depended on the Potato Factory for part of their livelihood would show up at the funeral in their Sunday best. Altogether, he hoped attendance would be kept to a minimum, but now with the workers asking to be at her graveside, it would give things the common touch she would have liked. Mary would have approved of her own people seeing her off without too much of a fuss.

  However, Hawk had underestimated the effect her life had had on the people of Hobart and the small towns beyond it. On the day of the funeral the early morning ferries and boats from the outlying districts up and down river were packed and the country roads unusually busy. By noon the common folk had gathered along the route from St David’s to the cemetery, removing their caps and bowing their heads as the funeral cortege passed them by. Many wore black armbands or bonnets and it became obvious they had come to say goodbye to Mary Abacus, who, despite her enormous wealth, had retained her common touch and, unlike most of the so-called nobs on the island, never concealed her convict origins. She had given them cottage hospitals, schools and soup kitchens, made work available to the poor and created a widows’ pension fund. Wherever a tied pub existed there would be an annual Christmas party for the children of the town or suburb, where no child went without a feed and a gift at Yuletide and, as well, took home a quart bottle of Tommo & Hawk Ale to their parents. She endowed the orphanage and educated and apprenticed its children, finally allowing them jobs in her various enterprises. Half the brewery workers thought of her as the nearest thing they would ever know as a guardian and now they lined the streets. Scarcely a person in the crowd hadn’t in some way or another been touched by the little cockney lass who had been transported to the Fatal Shore sixty years before.

  The plain folk knew they’d lost someone who could never be replaced in their affections. The Hobart Mercury reported:

  * * *

  Hats and caps were removed from the heads of the men and there were copious tears to be witnessed under
the bonnets of the women lining the streets to the grave yard. Not an inch of standing space appeared to be available for a hundred yards all about the site of the grave. A great many of the common folk brought informal floral tributes of their own, small bunches and single blooms from their gardens, even wildflowers picked along the lanes. Many brought a single potato as an acknowledgment to her humble beginnings. With due solemnity, they later placed these tributes upon the grave to form a mound of blossom well beyond six feet in height. Mary Abacus never slept under a softer, more perfumed quilt.

  * * *

  There was even talk of the governor coming to the funeral service, but this proved to be a false rumour. Chasms in Tasmanian society were too wide even for Mary to leap, or as Lady Teresa was heard to say at a tea party she attended on the day of the funeral, ‘One does not lift one’s skirt to step into the gutter.’

  Hawk, long accustomed to working together with Mary, has none of the usual male reservations about training Victoria to the task of taking over with her brother. Although she is still a small child, Victoria has shown an intelligence above that of Ben, who seems normal enough in all respects, his natural gifts no more than might be expected from a small boy of seven who rides his first pony.

  However, Hawk does not see himself as a mere caretaker, preserving Mary’s life’s work intact for her great-grandchildren to inherit. He has different plans for the Potato Factory which he modestly and correctly believes he has helped to build.

  For some time he has realised there is little chance of expanding their interests much further in Tasmania. Scarcely any sizable enterprises are left in which the Potato Factory does not have a finger in the pie. Mary had often talked of opening a brewery in Melbourne, though she knew that Hawk would need to be there to supervise it and she was reluctant to have him away from her. Now he thinks this may well be the way to go in the future.