‘I read somewhere that on his deathbed Napoleon Bonaparte called for Constantia wine,’ she said but saw they did not understand that either. I shouldn’t be here, she thought. I should be next door in Aberystwyth, doing the washing up with Mrs Amos chivvying me along.
The governor spoke and everyone drank her health.
‘So kind,’ she said. ‘So kind.’
Afterwards she asked if she might step into the garden for a moment to breathe the air and see the silver flowing river and remember.
‘Of course,’ Sir Henry said. But she saw he detailed a footman to accompany her, just in case.
She stood and listened to the night. Frogs and cicadas, and somewhere far off a boobook owl. At her back the lights of the house shone gold in the darkness. I stood here on my wedding day, she remembered. One way and another she and the house had been linked since even before it had been built. We have grown old together. Although the house is in better shape than I am, she laughed.
There was a rhododendron flowering. She touched one velvet petal with her finger.
‘So beautiful,’ she said. She looked around at the night and the stars and all things. The St Vincent gliding to her berth after her long journey. Her own journey, with the rhythm of hooves. Arthur Dunstable with tears of humiliation on his face. Mother and the Morgans and Philip and Roger and Mungo Jackson. All dead.
‘But I have loved,’ she said aloud. She smiled at the footman. ‘To love and be loved – there is no greater gift.’
He started forward but too late. The old woman had already fallen and now lay quietly, open-eyed upon the quiet grass. A rhododendron flower detached itself from the bush and floated down to rest beside the outstretched hand.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
Joanne
It became a police matter. My evidence plus what Averil and Colin had to say on the subject put the three men in an awkward spot. The Indonesian authorities – the real ones, this time – washed their hands of them. Which didn’t stop them wanting to get their hands on them as well. A formal request for deportation followed. They were returned to Jakarta with love and kisses from Joanne and no doubt others. I never heard what happened to them but doubted it would be anything good.
As for Poxon… Now, wouldn’t you know it. Dick Cottle hadn’t a good word to say for him. At the same time he didn’t want to get into more strife with the university council than he was already – Poxon had been his man, after all, and no doubt been well paid too – so he pulled every string he could to hush things up. Result: the slimy bastard got away with it all. But only in part. These things tend to get about in closed circles and the academic world was more closed than most. I had the feeling that in future the pestilential Pete might find it harder to insinuate himself into any worthwhile appointment in the hallowed halls of learning. A public service, really; he’d never been much chop when it came to either teaching or serious research.
* * *
Averil eventually got to China where her startling insights into the spiritual significance of certain of the non-military figures discovered at the same time as the terracotta warriors not only won her yet another award but a near guarantee of any chair she might want in any country in the world. As for her love-life, Sammy predictably went the way of all flesh. The next I heard she was profoundly in love with a Professor Chang, a professor in the College of Traditional Medicine in Beijing. Maybe this time things would work out for her. I certainly hoped so. If I’d doubted her it had been only for a moment although I still felt ashamed. Not only was she my dear and faithful friend; I doubted very much whether without her insights I should ever have discovered the long-lost crown of Muar. But I had, and there were consequences flowing from that as well.
‘An exquisite piece of art.’ The young man was pretty exquisite himself. ‘I must tell you the PM is deeply appreciative of everything you have done to bring it back to us. It must have been a remarkable journey for you.’
‘Well –’ I said.
‘Truly remarkable. The foreign minister will hand it over to their ambassador, of course.’
‘Well –’ I said.
Colin and I had talked about it.
‘It doesn’t seem right that we should hand it over to the people who took over Muar by force,’ he said.
‘They didn’t,’ I said. ‘When the Dutch pulled out there was a round table conference. Muar chose to join up with the rest of Indonesia. So the government in Jakarta is their government too.’
‘And the crown belongs to them all?’
‘That’s right.’
‘The PM feels that is the most suitable course of action,’ the young man said now.
‘Do we know what their government plans to do with it?’
I could sense him feeling around the edges of my question, testing whether there might be security considerations.
‘That will be for them to decide,’ he said.
‘Discretion is the better part of valour,’ I said.
‘Well said.’ He was clearly a stranger to irony.
‘What else would you expect from Shakespeare? Henry IV,’ I added. Joanne the purveyor of useless information.
‘Would you wish to be at the presentation?’
‘Sure.’
Why not? The eats were bound to be good. And I had found the bloody thing, after all.
‘I shall arrange it,’ he said kindly. Once again he admired the crown of Muar. ‘Most impressive,’ he said.
I reached out my hand and touched it for the last time. A remarkable journey indeed. I felt happy but tearful too.
The saga was not over. I met the ambassador; he thanked me and a year later I was invited to Jakarta, to the opening of a new section of the National Museum where the crown of Muar was both honourably and conspicuously displayed. After the long years of exile the crown was finally home and there was no longer any danger of other thugs from the Muar Independence Movement trying to put the bite on me for something I hadn’t got.
I never did find out who Amir was. My best guess was that he was acting for a collector who might have been willing to pay me millions… Dream on, Joanne. It was only money, after all.
I got a couple of honours for it: one from Indonesia and one from Australia. Mrs Boss was so furious she did not speak to me for months. What a bonus!
On Saturday 17 October, a beautiful spring morning, I rode to my wedding in an open carriage. It had taken a bit of finding but I had managed it with the aid of the museum curator. Boss and Mrs Boss thought it was ridiculous and said so, although not to me. I suspected Colin had his doubts too, but I was determined. So much of my recent past had been devoted to following in Cat Haggard’s footsteps that I wanted to emulate her in this also; the journey that I knew would be the most momentous in my life.
‘And if it rains?’ Colin had said.
‘It will not rain. I absolutely forbid it to rain.’
Nor did it. The carriage was a magnificent vehicle of richly polished wood with ivory-coloured wheels and trim, drawn by a pair of matching greys. I knew the manager of the racecourse and through him had been able to recruit a retired jockey to deal with the horses. I was holding a long-handled silk parasol to shield me from the sun.
Colin and I had bonded so closely that we might have been flesh of each other’s flesh, to misquote the Bible, yet we might never have taken the final, formal step had it not been for a party to which we had been invited by a literary agent I knew who was trying to get me to write the story of the now-famous crown and how we had tracked it down and returned it to the world. It was a great party, really cool, but what I remembered best was the pulsing of the strobe lights, the air on fire with the music’s beat, the singers strutting as proud as horses and Colin and me looking at each other, both of us hot and not only from the dance, and simultaneously saying shall we and answering in the same breath yes and yes and yes.
And here I was, with Colin – I trusted – waiting.
People stopped and some waved and I
waved back and it was as though Cat Haggard had returned from the past, if she had ever been away, and she and I rode side by side though the sunlit streets.
‘So you found it,’ she said.
‘Without you I could never have done it.’
‘That may be true. But if it had not wished to be found you would never have done it anyway,’ she said.
And perhaps that was true also, as so much of her life had been true, even when she’d been engaged in what the world would call crime. Because if Cat Haggard was a criminal so were we all, every man, woman and child, and let those who were without sin cast the first stone. Certainly she would never get one from me because I respected her with every aspect of my being.
So Cat Haggard and Joanne Fletcher rode side by side to my wedding and afterwards to the Governor’s House where she, one hundred and fifty-three years before, had stood in pride after her wedding. She had had a measure of love and a deal of tenderness and affection from her marriage; I had love too: a deep and abiding love which I knew would sustain me through the years ahead.
Now Cat Haggard and I were taking the final step together because Colin, like Roger Mortimer before him, had just had confirmation of his appointment as personal secretary to the governor. Tomorrow I would be moving into the secretary’s private quarters in the Governor’s House and the circle of our shared lives would be complete.
That night, after all the guests and laughter had gone, I stood on the lawn in the quiet night and looked at the river, as Catherine had no doubt looked, marvelling as I did at the strange symmetry of life. The Governor’s House had been at the core of my ancestor’s life as it would be mine – the beautiful building that now shone through the darkness, signalling to me as it had to her the road home and the fulfilment waiting at journey’s end.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Many prisoners awaiting transportation were incarcerated in hulks: decommissioned warships moored in various places including Plymouth Sound. Conditions on the hulks were generally appalling and many female prisoners took the opportunity of cohabiting with their gaolers as a means of escaping the squalid and disease-ridden holds that were their only alternative accommodation.
Female convicts were widely regarded as whores; some were, some weren’t. Prostitution was not a crime in Britain during the transportation era.
The St Vincent arrived in Hobart in April 1850. It brought a complement of 205 female prisoners, the authorities having decided years before to segregate convicts by gender. The last convict ship arrived in Tasmania in 1853.
Until 1844 female convicts had been incarcerated in so-called factories before being assigned to families as domestic servants. Under the probation system that came into force in that year convict women were held for six months either on the Anson hulk or at one of the various factories. Thereafter they were hired out, theoretically for wages, in much the same way as before. Their treatment varied according to the families to which they were sent. The probation system never worked satisfactorily and was abolished in 1853. If her employment ceased a convict servant was returned to gaol to complete her sentence. The Cascades female factory was converted to a prison in 1857.
The Governor’s House in Hobart was built much as described. This magnificent building is still in use today but has seventy-five rooms and not the two hundred ascribed to it by an over-excited Cat Haggard. The building materials used in its construction were as stated.
There were several instances of Australian colonies needing to be bailed out by the provision of coin from London.
The description of the expedition leading to the establishment of the Mount Haggard mine owes much to the real-life activities of a prospector with the unusual name of James Philosopher Smith who discovered the highly productive Mount Bischoff tin mine in the north-west corner of Tasmania in 1872.
There is no Mount Victoria Copper Mine in Tasmania. However, copper was discovered at Mount Lyell in 1886. The mine was opened in 1893 and produced not only large quantities of copper but also significant amounts of silver and gold. The pyritic smelter installed at Mount Lyell was the first of its kind in the world.
Spion Kop was the scene of a British defeat during the Anglo-Boer war.
Tasmania introduced compulsory education in 1868, becoming the first Australian colony to do so.
In 1882 the Married Women’s Property Act enabled wives to own property in their own right.
In 1895 Launceston became the first city in the southern hemisphere to introduce electric lighting.
The University of Tasmania has a campus in Hobart. This institution is recognised internationally as being of outstanding quality. The vice-chancellor featured in the text is a fictitious character and thankfully bears no resemblance to any real-life person at the university or elsewhere.
Tasmania had numerous governors during the period, but those mentioned in the story are figments of the author’s imagination. All other characters and their activities are also fictitious as is the Spice Island state of Muar and – sadly – its gloriously bejewelled crown.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Once again my profound thanks to the outstanding team at Harlequin and, as always, to my marvellous and inspirational agent Selwa Anthony. Also to my family for their unfailing support for which I shall always be grateful.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J.H. Fletcher is the prize-winning author of sixteen novels, published to both critical and popular acclaim in Australia, Germany and the UK, as well as numerous short stories and plays for radio and television. He was educated in England and France and travelled and worked in Europe, Asia and Africa before emigrating to Australia in 1991. Home is now a house on the edge of the Western Tier Mountains in northern Tasmania.
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ISBN: 9781488797804
Title: The Governor’s House
First Australian Publication 2015
Copyright © 2015 by J.H. Fletcher
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilisation of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the permission of the publisher:
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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