Skylark

by Jenny Pattrick

  What concern was this of Jack’s, I wanted to know? Why was he the messenger? Jack tried to brush away my questions, in such a lather was he, to give the disaster air, but in the end he explained that he was teaching the young Buckinghams to ride like proper ladies and gents, and was commissioned to break in and provide three riding horses and one good hackney for the family. He had arrived early that morning to find the mother in tears, the father in a panic and all those musical children moaning and carrying on as if the world was at an end.

  ‘Rosetta is down with a terrible fever,’ said Jack solemnly. ‘All she can manage is a croak. The doctor says she must not attempt to sing or even set foot out in the cold air for at least a fortnight. Mr Buckingham is beside himself. Rosetta is his star performer.’

  Jack took a deep breath and looked at me with shining eyes. ‘The Buckinghams are asking if you will stand in for her.’

  ‘For a fourteen-year-old?’ I asked. ‘I am a grown woman!’

  ‘Lily Alouette,’ he said, smiling in his fondest manner, ‘you are not yet eighteen, and Miss Rosetta is very grown-up in manner and stature.’

  He said this with such pride, as if the girl were one of his fillies! I looked at him sharply. But his gaze was steady.

  ‘Say you will, Lily. Think of it, to sing in front of Governor Gore Browne and his lady!’

  I was already thinking of it. I had seen the programme — who in town hadn’t? Two of the songs — ‘I Love the Night’ and ‘Queen of my Soul’ — I knew. But the others were new to me. And there was the large matter of the piano solos.

  Jack was ahead of me there. ‘Mrs Buckingham will play the piano accompaniment and Master Walter will do the piano-lesson duet. It is just the singing cannot be managed. The next little Buckingham girl is not secure enough yet.’

  You would think Jack was one of the family, the detail he could rattle off! I admit to a small twang of pique.

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ I said, though of course I knew very well. I loved to sing and here was an opportunity to make a name for myself.

  Jack knew too. Up he jumped and gave me a quick kiss. ‘I will wait outside while you dress. The Buckinghams’ trap awaits you at the door, Miss Rosetta!’

  And out he marched before I could say another word. So that was the way the land lay. I was to perform as Miss Rosetta Buckingham, not Miss Rosa Fisher. No doubt I would be decked out in Rosetta’s best dress, my hair — which was dark like hers — curled into ringlets, and my voice trained, over the course of a few hours, to sound like a sweet young miss instead of my own rich womanly tones.

  So it turned out. Mr Buckingham was apologetic, polite, but firm. The public wanted to hear Miss Rosetta. They had paid good money to hear her. The public loved the idea of a talented family and would feel disappointed, even tricked, he said, if they thought outsiders were part of the act.

  ‘Just this once,’ he said, and then after a moment’s thought, ‘or perhaps for a little longer, until she regains her health. Eh? You will be paid well, my dear. And I am prepared to give you free singing lessons for the rest of the year, if you agree.’

  If he thought I needed lessons, why was he asking me to stand in for his precious Rosetta? I knew my voice was better than hers. Rosetta had a sweet voice but it lacked power. Mr Buckingham had chosen light English folk songs (‘I Love the Merry Sunshine’, for one) that suited her voice. But how would she cope with a noisy audience once the Governor was gone and a normal crowd turned up to drink and cheer?

  Well, I agreed, for all my misgivings, and donned a pretty dress and an innocent face and sang my sweet songs and the audience loved Miss Rosetta. It was fun in a way. A piece of theatre. To pretend to be young and provocative, to pout and pose like the Buckingham children, was a new challenge. I got away with it, too. The family and Jack were sworn to secrecy and no one suspected the truth. Miss Rosetta Buckingham was greatly praised, though the reviewer was disappointed that ‘a slight injury to her hand meant that her piano pieces were performed by other members of this prodigiously talented family’.

  Rosetta was a sweet thing — or so I thought at that time — but not strong. She was prone to colds and fevers. On more than one occasion over the next few months I stood in for her. We were almost exactly the same height with similar dark hair and eyes. It amused me to imitate her winsome ways. Once I scored my own secret triumph. At one of the Buckingham soirées in the Venetian Saloon, as Rosetta lay in bed, coughing and wheezing, and I was singing one of her favourites (‘Queen of the Night’) I took breath and slowly began to increase the volume and depth of my voice. By the end of the song it was the full power of Rosa Fisher (or Lily Alouette) who reduced the audience to tearful silence, and then rapturous applause. I curtseyed sweetly and walked off stage. Mr Buckingham’s face was a picture: both worried and thoughtful. I gave him an innocent little smile, as if unaware of what I had just done. Next day the reviewer spent half a column praising the ‘astonishing development of Miss Rosetta’s voice’ and her ‘undoubted future as a first-class singer and entertainer’.

  There are times in all our lives when we are faced with difficult decisions. Should we go this way or that? Usually the hard choices are between continuing along the safe and comfortable path or taking a strange, exciting, but perhaps dangerous side-branch. Such a choice was offered me by the Buckinghams. I took my problem to dear Maria, who was with the circus down at Freeman’s Bay at the time.

  How well I remember walking down towards the harbour that morning, my hair piled on my head with a few ringlets escaping over my ears, the blessed sun warm on the bare nape of my neck, a song humming through my body in time with my feet. Along the shore the English soldiers were exercising their horses, with much jingling of spurs and flashing of uniforms. ‘Rosa!’ called one young fellow, touching his whip to his cap, and I waved back, happy as the lark for which I am named to be saluted by such a gallant.

  I am saying, you understand, that the decision was not weighing on me so heavily that a cheerful morning was dampened by doubt. And there, shining in the sun, was the red and white Foley’s flag atop the tent, the gaggle of animals and huts, and the lovely pungent smell that circuses have: dung, straw and canvas, mixed with the ingrained sweat of many an hour’s training.

  Outside her little whare (a temporary thing, half canvas, half timber, that sat to one side of the amphitheatre), I waited, making a little song and dance out of my arrival. ‘Maria, Maria! Come and show your wares!’ I sang — or some such nonsense. And out she popped, little Johnny tumbling around her skirts and baby Katie on her hip. What a sight she always was! Even with getting babies — and God knows she had plenty before her womb gave out — she never lost her sense of style. By that I mean circus style, of course. Scarves and feathers and flashing ropes of glass beads and bright ribbons in her hair. Fashionable folk might have said gaudy, but to my eyes she was mistress of high fashion.

  ‘Lily, my dear heart, here you are!’ she sang back, taking my note and embroidering the song, and dancing with me. ‘Here, take my little Katie while I fetch a sip of elderberry wine to do our hearts good this bright morning!’

  Oh, it always lifted my soul to spend an hour or two with Maria, even though I was no longer required in the circus — too out of practice now to ride bareback and, anyway, Mr Foley had a new clown and Tommy Bird filled in very well on the ponies. We sat on a little stool, sipping our cordial, the babies scuffling about in the dust, free as dogs or cats might be in their easy circus way.

  ‘Maria,’ I said to her finally, after we had explored the gossip of theatre, circus and the military too, who had their Auckland Barracks down nearby, ‘advise me what I should do. Mr Buckingham has asked me to tour Australia with his family in the name of Rosetta, who is not strong enough.’

  Maria cocked a dark eye at me. She knew immediately what my problem was.

  ‘Your handsome young man will not like it.’

  ‘He will not. No, he will not. He will feel betrayed and jealo
us and impatient with me.’ I touched the downy head of little Katie. ‘He will want me to stay and settle and make babies with him.’

  Maria tucked little Katie under her waft of scarves and shawls and suckled her, right out in the morning sun. Neither babe nor breast in view. What a free fierce spirit she was! So unlike Mr Foley’s first dragon of a wife.

  ‘Well then,’ said Maria, ‘you are not of the same inclination, or there would be no problem to solve. You want to go.’

  I sighed at the simplicity of her words. ‘But Maria, I want to go, yes, of course. And I want to stay with Jack, too. But I know he’ll not follow me this time. He is settled with his business.’

  ‘Lily, my lovely,’ said Maria in her firmest voice, ‘you are an entertainer, and a child of entertainers. Born to it. Like myself. I never saw a person so well designed in body and soul to perform as you. You might as well stop breathing air as stop entertaining. But you must know that we are like the gypsies of the world: the travellers, who are in one sense kin to us. We must move on. Move on. As the nomads move their animals in search of new pastures to graze, so we entertainers must move in search of new audiences to please, fresh purses to empty. It is a fact of our lives.’

  I wanted to argue. ‘Maman and Papa didn’t move on. They stayed season after season, performing for the tourists in Menton.’

  Maria shook her dark head and the showers of beads in her ears flashed warning lights all over my dull dress. ‘Well, that was a different country. And anyway, they moved on in the end. Lily, if you want to be a great performer and a good wife you must choose a soulmate who is a traveller too. As I have.’

  I was impatient with her smug smile. Didn’t Maria have a dreadful time of it in those years not so long ago? Didn’t she nearly die more than once ridding her body of unwanted children?

  Maria laughed at my long face. ‘Well, your Jack is a lovely, constant man. Perhaps he will wait one more time. You are still a young thing.’ She jumped to her feet, still holding little Katie to her breast. ‘Come and say hello to that other prodigy, Tommy Bird, who will be upside down somewhere. And don’t you dare smile too sweetly at my Bill! He’s my travelling man and not available.’ She took my arm with her one free one, and squeezed it. ‘You’ll manage somehow, Lily, you always do. But I’ll lay a bet that you will never settle down like a proper lady!’

  [Archivist’s Note: Lily’s journal here skips three years. We presume she continued to perform in Australia and New Zealand but this may not be so. She is not mentioned further in newspaper reviews. It may be that, encouraged by the success of her singing as Rosetta, she left the theatre for a period and performed in saloons as a singer. Lily gives no explanation for her omission, though crucial events recounted in Samuel Lacey’s second journal give us clues to poor Lily’s state of mind during these years. Her next entry, probably about 1860, places her in Australia with the Buckingham boys and a certain infamous sea captain! But before that fascinating episode, an excerpt from the second journal will throw some light on Lily’s circumstances. E. de M.]

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF SAMUEL LACEY

  Recollections of Jack Lacey (3)

  The horsebreeder

  [Archivist’s Note: Events described here probably took place between 1856 and 1861. E. de M.]

  Jack sits on his new horse, Midnight, looking over the heads of people and the sea of butchers’ drays as the clipper William Prowse noses into Queen’s Wharf. He wants to cast his eye over the stock as it comes ashore, hoping to get in first with a good offer before the horse bazaar in the morning. Surely the next hour or two will be a chaos of milling and shoving, shouting and whistling. Along with the sixty horses aboard from farms in the north are six hundred ewes for slaughter and two hundred head of cattle! Jack hopes the horses will be disembarked first. He shakes his head, imagining the conditions on board with so many silly ewes panicked by their rough sea voyage.

  The advertisement in the Southern Cross mentioned that some of the horses were unbroken. These are of interest to Jack. Out of town, in Epsom, he has rented twenty-five acres of good grazing land. He has bought a few unbroken horses, broken them in and already sold several at a fine profit to the fast-growing population of the capital. Now he can afford to buy more. One of his fields has been converted to a circular track, not only for training horses, but also for teaching young ladies and gentlemen to ride. Many settlers, who came out as labourers, now own their own farms and businesses and want their children to ride well or manage a hack or even a carriage, like those who have been born to fine manners. Younger members of the Buckingham family come regularly and are favourites with him, especially the lively Rosetta, who loves to ride.

  Jack rides up and down in the early morning sun, keeping his frisky Midnight occupied, while a section of the cutter’s side is lowered and a wide ramp run aboard from the wharf. Now the racket of bleating and lowing can be heard. Stockmen line the wharf with their dogs, ready to guide the animals ashore. The unbroken horses will be mad with fear, thinks Jack; surely I will get them for a good price.

  Makeshift yards have been erected on the land beside the wharf. And here with a drumming of hooves they come, pounding down the ramp, almost knocking one of the stockmen into the sea. Broken or not, they come in a tumbling rush, wild-eyed and snorting, a close pack of tossing manes and heads. Jack likes the look of them, though; they are big, strong in the leg, perhaps not thoroughbred, but all the healthier for that. No more roaming the country, he thinks. There is a good life to be made here. Surely Lily will settle here with me. He remembers with pride her performance as Rosetta Buckingham. She was so polished, so confident. He feels sure that the experience will encourage her to pursue the gentler art of drawing-room singing in a home they will make together.

  He trots up to the yards, dismounts and has a word with the agent. Together they study the horses. Jack helps him to sort broken and unbroken into separate yards. Jack points with his crop. ‘That big bay; the black pony; the one with the white flash over in the corner; and the little grey mare. Perhaps the black stallion too, although he looks a wild one.’ Jack likes a challenge.

  The agent nods. ‘You’ve got a good eye. I’d agree, except maybe for the black. Why the grey mare?’

  ‘I’m looking for a mount for a young lady. This might fit the bill.’ He’s thinking of Rosetta. Mr Buckingham wants to present his favourite daughter with a special birthday present.

  The agent nods. ‘You’ve your head screwed on, Sir. The town is growing fast. New-made gentry are popping up every day, demanding solid houses with a proper kitchen, out-house attached, even a serving girl in the scullery — and a mount or two, or at least a dog-cart. You’ve hit the nail, Sir, and good luck to you.’

  Jack makes a good offer, but only if the agent will allow him to take the stock ‘off his hands’ before the auction in the morning. The busy agent agrees. By midday, Jack is heading up to Epsom with two assistants and five unruly horses in tow.

  Over the next months his business flourishes. The romance with Lily does not. She keeps disappearing. One day she will be picnicking with him at one of the picturesque Auckland beaches, lively and loving, galloping over the sand on her own horse, which Jack has trained for her, or running into the water like an urchin, laughing and shrieking and throwing water at him. Then she will be gone; a note at her boarding house explaining that she has taken the steamer down to Whanganui for ‘a short season’. A short season of what? Has Mrs Foley demanded her presence again? Is Foley’s Circus set up in Whanganui? Is she — God forbid — setting up on her own as a performer in the rough taverns and saloons of that town? Jack can only wait sadly until she returns. Fearing, indeed, that his headstrong sweetheart may not return.

  She is so different from other ladies in the colony. It seems to Jack that performers like Lily and her friends are bred from a wilder strain of human being, like the most difficult and spirited of his unbroken horses. They actually thrive on uncertainty and change. They enjoy being constan
tly on the move from one town to the next, appearing before motley audiences who are often drunk, often rude and unruly. Jack simply cannot understand this side of Lily, though he is entranced by her when she is in his presence. Jack can gentle the most intransigent of horses, but all his charm, all his pleading cannot tame Lily Alouette. He begins to lose heart.

  The last straw is her decision to tour Australia with some of the Buckingham family.

  ‘Jack,’ says Lily sweetly one day, ‘I may be away for a little longer this time. Promise you’ll wait for me.’

  They are on horseback, high above the sea on a promontory beside the Maori pa of the Ngati Whatua. Jack waves to one of the native farmers, who shouts a greeting and waves back. They have had dealings over horseflesh.

  Jack looks at his difficult, beautiful girl. The gallop up the hill has loosened her hair which now streams out from her face. Her cheeks are flushed, her dark eyes alight. He groans out loud.

  ‘Lily, Lily, don’t say it. I cannot follow you any more and I fear I cannot wait much longer.’

  Lily sighs. ‘The Buckinghams are going to Australia — or the older boys are. Mr Buckingham has asked me to join them. Poor Rosetta is not strong enough for a prolonged tour.’

  Jack’s heart sinks at the words. ‘Prolonged tour? Lily, what are you saying?’

  She explains that Auckland audiences are dropping off. The military are moving south to quell disturbances and with them gone the settlement is likely to die, according to Mr Buckingham. The larger towns of Sydney and Melbourne will welcome the Buckingham Family Entertainers. It seems that Mrs Buckingham and the younger ones will stay in Auckland — with Rosetta — while the boys seek richer pickings in Australia. But they need a lady singer in the troupe.