At our meeting place at the confluence of Cooma and Middle Flat Creeks, I was careful to instruct Felix that if stopped by constables, as might happen to a half-caste boy, he should speak quietly and reasonably to them, and should mention my name. If that failed, he should show them a letter I had written on paper I had begged from Mr Paltinglass. It advised whomsoever that he was carrying a message from me to Mr Barley. I did not like to embarrass Barley by invoking his name as a ploy, but in any case he would need to be asked to help me even more concretely than that.
On another sheet I wrote a note to Bernard, and sealed it, and as I set off after Felix, gave it to Long, who had just finished breakfast at the Royal. I had utter confidence in all parties to the arrangement – in Long, in Bernard, even in my flawed self. A half-embarrassed tone had until now, I saw, marked my discourse with Bernard. Bernard herself had that reserve as well. So I was suddenly determined to alter things with a very heated letter, which the time I had now spent away from Nugan Ganway and her gave me the authority to write.
My most remarkable and beloved Bernard,
I must go to Sydney for reasons to be explained, but regret each mile that stands between and intend to be back with you in an unprecedented time. Hard riding is justifiable for the sake of the company of so incomparable a companion. Until then, retain a fond memory of me, since your humble supplicant and lover lives for the kindness of your eyes.
I have asked good Sean to deliver this.
Your loving servant,
John Bettany
Felix had his bed-roll and would sleep at night on the edge of bullock-wagon camp sites along the Sydney road. There were, of course, risks in that – brawls, assaults, shouted insults from ticket-of-leave wagoners and drivers who, from within the standpoint of their own flawed blood, were often willing to find fault with the blood of others. These taunts would be hard for Felix to bear, now that it seemed that the improbable truth was that his blood was half Goldspink’s, that half his cleverness flowed from the same tainted well. But I had to depend on Felix’s wisdom and physique to protect him, and also on the rough fairness of the sort of convict represented by Long and O’Dallow, the kind of men who would inevitably cry, ‘Leave the poor bloody boy alone!’
I stayed in inns, occasionally talking to the publicans about how hard I had travelled, and wondering had they seen a young, half-caste go by on a bold grey mare.
I had to change my team of horses at the town of Mittagong, renting new ones and leaving mine in stables there. A few of the grooms had sighted Felix and Whitey. In the warming air of early November, Felix rode in shirt sleeves, according to their fleeting memories, and ‘looked a handsome nigger’.
‘Did he steal from you, sir?’ they asked.
Felix and I were at one stage so close that I believe I sighted him from the crest of a long, low hill beyond the Black Huts and outside Liverpool. I had by then been chasing and not-chasing him for a week. It was the last I saw of him for the moment. I had told him to take a room at the Seaman’s Mission in George Street, to tell the good people who administered it that he intended to find a berth on a ship, and that he would like a bed in the coloured dormitory. There he would find himself surrounded by Malay, Kanaka and West Indian mariners and whalers, yet again I had no choice than to be confident in his reserve and aplomb.
Arrived in Sydney, I visited the Colonial Secretary’s Office in urbane Macquarie Street, where some very handsome residences of three floors had been built to look down, over the government’s broad botanical gardens, at Government House, the harbour, and the Sydney Heads. I consulted a number of Imperial Gazetteers, from which I discovered the names of the Senior British Resident in Singapore, Sir Baldric Thorsen; the Bishop of Singapore, the Most Reverend Edgar Hamer; and the Chief Agent of the East India Company, Cecil Plumley. At my hotel I wrote letters, as one Briton soliciting the services of another, recommending Felix Bettany, my ward, to all these worthy gentlemen and (in case malaria had been unkind to them) their successors. I then asked a few people randomly had they seen a young man like Felix around the seamen’s boarding houses of Woolloomooloo, and in the dusk drove out along the South Head Road, seeing the early lanterns of convict night-watchmen at a sandstone quarry and by a timber yard.
At Barley’s splendid hearth, the nature of my recent loss was made bitingly apparent to me. The man stood by his mantelpiece, his wife sewing, and his ten-year-old daughter reading to both of them from Boswell’s An Account of Corsica. By the door, a Scottish maid was listening, holding in her arms the utterly sleep-limp Barley son and heir. It had come to a pass where I reminded myself for consolation’s sake he and his wife had lost a daughter in infancy. So he was no stranger to the breath of that great furnace.
‘Do you have someone with you, Mr Bettany?’ he asked me. ‘Someone to take to kitchen.’
‘No, I am on my own,’ I assured him.
‘Ah,’ said Mrs Barley softly, ‘have the Sydney radicals succeeded to the point of punishing such a pastoralist as you that you have not a servant left to yourself?’
‘No, Mrs Barley, not yet. Mine are all scattered about the Maneroo, growing wealth for the Barleys.’
I said this with some urgency to lighten the tone, for I could see it forming in their throats to commiserate with me at my loss. I did not want them to, not least since they did not know that I had now been both lost and found. But Mr Barley came forward and laid a hand on my sheepskin coat.
‘We prayed that you might have fortitude, my friend.’
‘That is so,’ Mrs Barley confirmed.
The girl child observed me sombrely with Boswell’s book in her hands.
‘Thank you,’ I told the little family.
‘Oh please, my friend take up a seat,’ Barley urged me.
‘I would like greatly to sit at the heart of your family,’ I told him. ‘But there are some matters …’
‘Of course,’ he said, standing again at once. ‘You didn’t come up here out of your normal time, dear chap, just to see how well young Clara here is reading. No, of course, not even for such a wondrous performance!’
Mrs Barley and Clara laughed – there was a genuine amusement in both – and I thought what a fortunate man Barley was to be so admired by both a wife and a daughter.
Soon we were in his study. ‘So, do you for once have time to visit my new Darling Harbour wool stores? I am out of dark woods, dear old Bettany, and into birdsong, absolute birdsong.’
‘I would be more than happy to have a friend in absolute birdsong,’ I told him, ‘though by the appearance of tranquillity I just saw in your parlour, you are already there. In any case, I have come for a great favour I have no right to ask, dear Barley.’
‘We are friends and partners.’
‘But you may now hear things of me … Not that the gossip of Nugan Ganway would be of much interest to Sydney-siders.’
‘Sir,’ said Barley, ‘only gossip I will countenance concerning yourself is gossip from your own mouth. I feel, however, there is something I might do for you.’
I told him how I had met the brilliant Felix a decade past, and that I wished for sundry reasons to send him out of the colony. ‘Thus,’ I asked, ‘do you have any of your ships in harbour at the moment?’
‘I have charter contracts with two ships in port at the moment,’ he said with a casual shrug, used to the habit of proprietorship. ‘Hindustan with wool for Britain, non-stop, in search of a Sydney to London record in fact, and a partial charter with Goulburn, which is for Liverpool by way of Singapore and the Cape.’
‘If you were to authorise the captain of the Goulburn to be of service to me, I would be very grateful.’
‘I could take you aboard Goulburn in the morning.’
‘Better for your sake not to, Mr Barley. But an enthusiastic letter of reference and a request that I be offered any reasonable service would do as well.’
He said certainly, and wrote me an excellent introduction to a Captain Robert Parfi
tt. By then Barley’s womenfolk had gone to bed and so I said goodbye to my friend and drove back to town. I sent a message to Felix Bettany, Seaman Apprentice, care of the Seaman’s Mission, George Street, telling him to meet me at the Dockyard steps at six o’clock the next morning. I thought that surely the messenger boys of the Australia Hotel would not be sought out and questioned by a vengeful Treloar.
That night was consumed with longing and sadness. I had lost my son by blood and was about to lose my son by wardship. The pillow beneath my head seemed full of the threat of subsidence, of fragility, and not having slept at all in my room at the elegant Australia Hotel, I rose at four and read a Sydney Herald in the cold smoking room to pass the hour to dawn. I was at the Dockyard in my phaeton before five, went to the hut where the boatmen congregated, and reserved as mine an old man with one glaucous eye and a second which did not seem much better. At half-past five I saw Felix walking beneath quenched lamp posts from the direction of George Street. At the meeting place outside Cooma, I had given him money to buy some sea kit, and I was pleased to see he carried a canvas bag, wore boots and the sort of droopy hat favoured by fishermen.
I intercepted him when he was close, put my finger to my lips, and fetched my boatman, whom I hoped had enough eyesight to take us to the Goulburn, but not much more. We were away at once, as the sun came up in the mouth of the harbour. The Goulburn was moored off Milson’s Point, and looked a well-made four-master of, I guessed, some 700 tons, larger than the old Fortitude on which Mother, Simon and myself came to join Father in Van Diemen’s Land. Felix and I were soon ascending the ship’s stairs. Captain Parfitt, a little mahogany-complexioned man in a straight-fronted naval coat which reached nearly to his knees, was on his quarter-deck, and watched Felix and myself climb aboard. A sailor in the well-deck greeted us and I begged to be allowed to present Captain Parfitt with Barley’s letter. The seaman indicated a companionway.
‘Wait here,’ I told Felix, and climbed towards the captain, who watched me through bright, narrowed eyes.
I told the captain that I carried a letter from Mr Barley. Parfitt’s entire demeanour altered and he now dropped at once the air of treating Felix and myself as intruders. He accepted the letter, and when he had read it, took off his cap and smoothed his streaked hair, still cocked from having recently risen.
‘Mr Bettany, sir,’ he said in a Lowland Scots accent not unlike that of Dr Alladair of Cooma, ‘how may I serve you?’
‘I have a very promising native boy, Felix, in my care. He wishes to go to Singapore, and perhaps later return. He is both a splendid scholar and a skilled horseman, and he wishes to add a maritime education to his admirable battery of skills. I would be grateful if you took him on as an apprentice steward or clerk.’
‘Mr Bettany,’ said the captain, ‘you must understand I am due to sail on this evening’s tide and happen to have already signed a manservant-cum-steward all the way through to London. Which doesn’t mean of course that he is more reliable than your – is it Felix? – than Felix there. Could not your boy travel as a steerage passenger, and I and the mates will happily teach him the names of shrouds, the setting of sails, the use of the sextant and other mysteries, as well as setting him educative tasks?’
It was very cunning of the captain, I thought, to get me to pay for a passage and at the same time acquire a servant for no cost. I wished that Felix should be well-used and not left to idleness, chiefly because the boy, haunted and lonely as he might be, would need the bodily and intellectual distraction of a maritime life. I doubted the occasional attention the captain and his officers extended to a passenger, however charming they might find him, would fill his day with benign activity.
A middle-aged woman of average height and wearing a black dress appeared, drawing breath, at the railing amidships. She stared out across the harbour water at the town, or as Sydney-siders liked to say, city, where already the crisp sound of a good axeman at work could be heard, and the sizzle of cross-saws rose from the maws of saw-pits. I saw her notice Felix, and come up to him and begin speaking. She had the smile which, it seemed to me, everyone brought to meetings with this boy. I was cheered that Parfitt too would see that a warm conversation had begun between Felix and the woman I presumed to be his wife.
‘I would not want him to travel steerage, sir,’ I said in a lowered voice, like a man who wanted to reach an understanding with another worldly fellow. ‘Given that to travel steerage is to experience everything a sailor does, but to learn nothing. It is apposite to my needs that he take up the life of a mariner or find business ashore somewhere. It is very apposite.’
So of course I saw in his eyes that he took it that the boy was my son by a native woman, and that my motive for finding him a career on the broad sea was that he might not embarrass my white children.
I said, ‘I would be willing to pay his wages as far as Singapore, where he says he wishes to land.’
The middle-aged woman in the black dress was now leading Felix up the companionway to join us. Parfitt turned his head and watched her. But clearly, she did not need the permission others did to invade this deck sacred to males.
In a very jolly Scots accent she sang, ‘Captain Parfitt, have you met this splendid boy? Of a very fetching hue, but he talks like a Lord Chancellor, and when I asked him what he was doing here, why he says, “Madam, I wish to learn a little of the sea”! Do tell me, is he going to sea with us?’
I knew that this woman was a kindly visitation and Parfitt glanced at me in a way which said, ‘Our secret, old man! Women would not understand.’ In the circumstances I was happy to remain under the suspicion of being Felix’s begetter.
‘Very well, Mr Bettany,’ murmured the little captain, ‘I will put him to task as an apprentice mariner if you will meet his upkeep. My wife takes delight in teaching reading to many young members of the crew.’
‘She will not be put to the trouble, captain. This boy is a prodigy. He reads not only English, but Latin and Greek as well.’ He half-smiled, disbelieving, and looked away into the top masts. ‘Then, maybe, Sir, he can read to the good wife.’ He called to his wife, who was already pointing out to Felix a vegetable garden on Blue’s Point. ‘He is joining us, my dear, as apprentice mariner.’
The woman beamed so maternally that I thought Felix stood the risk of being coddled.
‘What shall I call him for now on the ship’s books?’ the captain asked me in a lowered voice. ‘ “Felix, an Australian Native?”’
It would be convenient for him to be so listed. Then authorities in Sydney could never be sure, if they inquired, who Felix the Native was.
Yet I could not see him so plainly entitled. ‘I would like him called Felix Bettany, Captain.’
‘You are fond of the lad,’ observed Parfitt.
I was invited below, and the captain gave me tea in his little dining room, quite separate from the officers’ mess. Prints were bolted to the walls, and tartan curtains framed the ports. After he had extracted £25 from me for Felix’s tuition and upkeep, we discussed where Felix might bunk, and the captain said it should be in a little cuddy forward, with the ship’s carpenter, a reliable man and a strong Presbyterian. Now we were joined by Mrs Parfitt and Felix. Mrs Parfitt, having conducted Felix throughout the ship, drank her tea thirstily. ‘Oh, Felix is no deckhand,’ she told us. ‘He will read to us in the evenings!’ He would also be the target of blows and resentment from other members of the crew, if she were not careful.
‘Perhaps,’ the captain agreed. ‘But he must be put to toils as well. Mr Bettany wishes it so.’
I had a sense now of my time aboard aching to a close, and found it painful to behold in Felix’s eyes both the fear I had encountered there ten years past, but along with it the intelligent willingness to attempt anything which did not seem fatal to other humans. I asked might I say goodbye to the boy on deck? I shook his hand in a corner under the quarter-deck.
‘You have the money I gave you?’ I asked him.
; He said he did.
‘The captain will keep it safe for you. He has a locked box for these purposes.’
He nodded politely, for he had heard me say all this two or three times before, at the pier, in the boat on the way.
Then he began spontaneously to weep. ‘Is Goldspink my father?’ he asked. ‘Do I have that curse on me?’
His eyes had no childhood left in them, and it was apparent he feared himself a patricide.
With other deceits behind me, I was now accomplished at lies. ‘Goldspink was not your father. Your father was Rowan, the absconder, who was shot some years back.’ Better he should think his father had once tried to drown him than that he had broken his father’s skull. ‘In the most real sense of the term, I am your father. But now, I liberate you.’ I put my hand on his head, as the Romans did, freeing a slave. Manu-mission. But it struck me he could never come back to this haunted land, or at least, not back to Nugan Ganway. I said, ‘Here on this ship, and in Singapore, you will be free of evil dreams, Felix. You will be God’s favoured child.’
He began clearing away his tears. I looked at his arms, made muscular on stock rides at Nugan Ganway.
Mrs Parfitt now emerged from the cabin, and came towards us, putting a hand on Felix’s shoulder. ‘The tears of setting sail,’ she said. ‘In my day I’ve wept a lake of them myself, laddie.’ In that reliably banal way, she smoothed out the strange angles of our farewell and turned it into a normal departure. Soon I was back in my boat waving a farewell to Felix who stood at the midships rail. I was weeping myself, knowing I would never see a boy like this one again.
Yet I too had been somewhat freed by my endeavours in Felix’s regard. I was able to feel an unclouded joy, rather than a plaintive hunger, in returning to Bernard.
WHILE PRIM WAS IN HESSIANTOWN, DIMP went to Singapore seeking funds.
What she called ‘a report from the front’ joined an earlier of her faxes in Prim’s in-tray in the closed office in Khartoum.
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