Bettany's Book (40 page)

Long was staring steadily and with a murderous frown at the Land Commissioner. All I could do was go on arguing, somewhere between a bellow and a bleat. ‘One native cairn and two marked trees. You’ll try to expel me for one cairn and two damned trees? When I have taken a vacuum and given it substance?’

‘Ah, now you’re falling back on a principle more abstract than that provided for by the
Land Occupation Act
,’ he told me. ‘This land, though unoccupied, has always belonged to the Crown. You took it without permission …’

‘But if that’s true, it’s true of Treloar too. Yet Treloar has your blessing, and I am the one who is to be cast out!’

Peske’s constables were growing bored and looking away at the blue mountains of evening. Did this ridiculous freckled gallant ride round routinely telling people they had lost their pasture and that their flocks were forfeit?

‘You might as well ride away,’ I assured him. ‘It will take greater force than you have at your disposal to push me off.’

‘Now you are talking like some Irish or Scots revolutionary. Wouldn’t you be ashamed to be taken away in chains to Braidwood?’

‘I
would
be shamed. I would also be howling angry.’

‘Your anger would not signify anything,’ said Captain Peske, again slapping the ham of his tight-trousered leg. ‘I am more than accustomed to anger. It is a product of my calling.’

‘I shall challenge you in the Lords.’

‘In London? That would be very expensive.’

He looked so owl-wise that I began to laugh. This must be a joke put together by Charlie Batchelor. Maybe Charlie was visiting me, and had sent these fellows in costume ahead. And now he was concealed behind some tree, laughing!

‘We have in case all night to argue,’ I told the operatic captain in his uniform devised by no known army. The overarching law, like the curlews in the high trees, where the last light remained only for a moment, would need to sleep. ‘You and your men require shelter and refreshment. You can have that, but not my land.’

Peske sounded both sympathetic and doubtful. ‘You would not, I trust, slaughter us in our blankets as the Campbells did the MacDonalds?’

I looked levelly at him. ‘Come inside.’

‘Well,’ Peske said, ‘though I’m aware of being a nuisance to you, Mr Bettany, I find the concept of a rum-tea delightful, should you have rum. But I am reluctant in the grievous circumstances to impose.’

Long made up a drum of tea and cooked damper, and entertained the constables outside while the black trooper started his own campfire in the lee of some boulders beyond the stockyards. It was Long’s way of ensuring I could have time alone with the ridiculous Peske, who sat with me at my sheet-bark table drinking tea laced with rum as politely as if he had not just told me to leave Nugan Ganway. He annoyed me further by feeling the freedom to inspect my small bookcase, which these days had come to accommodate such works as Wainwright’s
Sheep Breeding
, a bound volume of the
Illustrated London News
I had bought in Liverpool after selling my sheep, Macaulay’s
Essays
, the King James version of the Bible, Curry’s
The Punic Wars
, a work on Euclidean geometry, as well as the founding volume of my bush library,
The Odes of Horace
. He pulled this last out and began to leaf through it. He looked at the inscription inside the cover, and my father’s name.

‘Robert Bettany,’ he said. ‘But I knew a Mr Robert Bettany. My old tutor in Van Diemen’s Land. Excellent old chap, emancipated felon of some kind. Quite a burning zeal for dear old Horace.’

‘Your old tutor?’

‘Well, not so much mine. He taught boys called the Batchelors, and I went to stay with their family while my mother was ill.’

He was a fellow for thunderous declarations. Having with utter certainty declared himself a Roman emperor, he now revealed himself as my father’s pupil.

‘That emancipated felon, as you call him, with the passion for Horace … that is my father. I remember you. Your mother …’

‘Yes, she died a year later in Hobart Town. Charitable creatures, the Batchelors. But your father …?
Your
father? Really?’

I was not as worried any more, for I remembered the wide-eyed, tear-reddened child this usurper had been when I too was a small boy. His father had been the Crown Solicitor of Van Diemen’s Land, and, in the absence of a mother, it seemed young Peske had cleaved fast to the forces of authority, had somehow acquired the (you could be sure) colonial title of ‘Captain’ – his passion for military clothing indicated the amateur campaigner! – and become a Land Commissioner to serve the
Land Occupation Act
in New South Wales.

‘So my father taught you Horace.’ I now made my own declaration. ‘And your old friend Charlie Batchelor is my partner here on Nugan Ganway.’

‘But you are surely not little Bettany whom I knew?’ Peske asked. (He may of course have been thinking of my brother, Simon, but I would for the sake of my land claim be any little Bettany he chose.)

‘You are surely not the little Peske whom I knew?’ I countered.

He whistled and shook his head. Then he said, as if to honour my father, ‘…
dum loquimur, fugit invida aetas; carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero
’ ‘While we speak, jealous time runs its way. Since you can have little faith in the morrow, seize the day!’

He put the book reverently away and came and sat opposite me, meekly refilling his mug of tea and daring to spice it with rum.

‘And Charlie Batchelor himself is your partner?’

‘Absolutely. These are in large part his sheep you would confiscate! I wish you well with it, not least when the news gets back to Hobart.’

He considered this bleakly for a while. ‘Oh my God this puts me in a pickle. Bettany, my God it does!’ He shook his head. ‘You have done pretty well here, you know.’

‘Not according to you.’

He actually groaned. ‘It’s not really Treloar who wants you gone. He was conscripted by others, and I in turn was conscripted. Not as if I were someone’s lackey. I came here willingly on the report of an eminent gentleman.’

‘Finlay,’ I suggested.

‘Yes. It is on the demand of Mr Finlay of the county of Argyle that I am instructed to move against you in Treloar’s name. How is your father, by the way? I didn’t ask.’

‘My father’s well and practising law in Hobart. But Finlay wants me ejected?’

‘My dear friend, you have no idea what a scoundrel he makes you seem. I came out here determined to evict that scoundrel, that … well, I dare not use the words he used. What I find is no apparent scoundrel at all but a civilised chap who happens to be old Bettany’s son.’

I swallowed a sick anger which had risen in me. ‘What is it Finlay tells you, and no doubt others, about me?’

‘Oh you sound a squalid man indeed in his mouth, dear young Bettany. That’s why I rode up here ready to give you the full force of all legal devices open to me. According to Finlay you are the leering son of a felon who tried to suppress the information of who you were, and who has poured your efforts into the seduction of his daughter as a means of acquiring some of his wealth. Because of your designs, he claims, he went to the trouble of sending his daughter to an academy in Switzerland!’

I hurled my mug of tea, still hot, past Peske’s ear. It landed in the fire, where I was content to leave it sizzle and blacken as a proxy for Mr Finlay. I roared, ‘Let me say that where he has not chosen to confuse cause and effect, he is a liar, and I shall challenge anyone who stands for the concept that he is in any way an honest man.’

Peske laughed silently, laughter which had more fear than hilarity in it. ‘Come, young Bettany. This is not some duelling place like Italy or Ireland.’

‘If it’s not,’ I told him, ‘it’s a bloody pity.’

‘Well,’ said Peske, by now well-fortified, ‘I will admit that calm regard for truth is often borne away when there is some chance of gain. If you ask me why Finlay would want your livestock confiscated, I can tell you that confiscated sheep go for knock-down prices, not at usual market rates. I don’t know, and I will deny I said it if you say I did, but perhaps
the desire to pick up your Merinos cheaply further warped the picture Mr Finlay purports to have of you.’

‘I won’t beg, Mr Peske ––’

‘Captain. Mr Bettany. Captain, if you don’t mind.’

‘I won’t beg, Captain. But in a case of clear tyranny, whose servant you set out to be and seem now to have repented of, what can you do for me?’

Peske thought for a time. ‘It is very true that during the short existence of Land Commissioners, my colleagues in the business have given us a repute for following an independent line and never giving anyone quite what they want. I suggest to you, Mr Bettany, that in the next few days you make some blazes on trees some forty miles south of here. I will use them as the basis of awarding this station to you. I will suggest to Mr Treloar that he is entitled by his blaze to stock the high land between Dainer’s Gap and the summit. I know he does not want to, his desire for that country being purely to accommodate Mr Finlay, but he will feel he is receiving some joy. You will have to pay license fees to cover Nugan Ganway, £10 for every twenty square miles – yes, you must, since that is the law, and no one’s malice. I shall leave your flocks untouched and adjudge you the legal leaseholder. I will hope that if ever I take up settling, no friend of Mr Finlay’s becomes my Land Commissioner.’

At dawn the next day Long was surprised and not a little pleased to discover that we were not leaving Nugan Ganway. My licenses had cost me £30, for which Peske accepted a cheque on the Savings Bank and gave a receipt.

I now had paper for this land, and official title.

A
FTER
P
RIM’S FIRST VISIT TO
Khalda el Rahzi’s house, she began to interview young men and women known to the eminent Mrs el Rahzi who claimed to have been subjected to slavery. Sometimes accommodatingly Mrs el Rahzi acted as translator, or at least as verifier of what Prim herself could make out, but on other occasions Prim used a sceptic like Dr Sherif Taha.

Prim sent copies of the transcripts of interview to Peter Whitloaf, the Director of Austfam; to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva; and to the sundry national entities of Save the Children.

In the meantime, she could not fight off the likelihood of a visit to Australia. The place exercised its own subtle gravity, but Dimp represented a more direct pull, and invited Prim to attend a third anniversary party in Sydney.

Do come and see my dear D’Arcy, the annul-er, in his earnest impersonation of being my husband. Okay, I speak fondly, of course. But in spite of the good talking to you gave me, in the night, when a person is at her maddest, I do wake and I think he didn’t love Robyn enough and he doesn’t love me enough to risk the fires of hell. In the darkness, this can for twenty minutes or so seem a big issue. It begs the whole question of whether I’m worth risking damnation for, a proposition I very much doubt! But the idea of the suitor being willing to go to Hades for us must be deep in our brains, because the story is in all cultures, isn’t it, including Orpheus going to hell to rescue Eurydice? And now the question is, would D’Arcy go to Hades to fetch me back without first getting his return ticket stamped by the Vatican?

But we’re going to celebrate the loving ambiguities which bind us, me and Bren, next February, last weekend of the month, with an anniversary party. And it would be wonderful for our morale if you could come so that we could both feast our eyes on our only living close relative.

Dimp also announced she’d nearly finished a screenplay on Jonathan Bettany – his love of sheep and other things – wonderful stuff, she said.

Like many of the guilt-stricken, he’s not very effective. Except in some ways. I mean he distributes carbines to his shepherds and stockmen as if they’re picks or shovels, and we know those Monaro tribes – that he called the Moth people – were decimated, cowed and driven off. He gives us the signal by talking about them as a problem – and his men deal with the problem out of his sight and at a distance from his own trigger finger. He might instruct them one way, but they pick up the message his own morality won’t let him utter, and they do the job. And yet he hates massacres and pursues those who commit them – have you read that bit yet?

If you can come this February, we’ll buy you a first-class ticket! Bring Sherif too. No argument. D’Arcy can afford it. He’ll claim it off his tax if he has a single conversation with you about Sudanese mines and resources.

Though Prim did not rush to read the Bettany transcripts when they arrived, she was engrossed, despite herself, although she felt guiltily that any interest she showed might somehow act as a subliminal message to Dimp to take it all too seriously.

One day Sherif saw pages of the transcripts heaped on Prim’s coffee table.

‘What are these?’ he asked.