Bettany's Book (42 page)

My betrothed, Phoebe Finlay? I interrupted the amusements of the two absconders and took them aside.

‘What is this about?’

‘There’s a holy woman and a young one there,’ Rowan told me.

‘Poor young woman’s got the collywobbles,’ said Brody.

Did these two share a hut with them, the miraculously nearby Phoebe and her friend?

I should have been afraid, to honour the tradition of the habitual bachelor, but I was excited. It was as if Phoebe had been summoned by my secret need of what Barley called a ‘rudder’. But she was ill, and I was instantly anxious. In my memory she had that delicacy which might easily be borne away by a fever.

Though dark was approaching, I packed my saddlebags. As I gathered myself within the house, the men drank tea by a fire in the open. Before leaving, I took Long aside. He was to see the absconders went that night. Nugan Ganway was to be no scene of extended Celtic reunion. I rode out on the now seven-year-old Hobbes and behind me, from the direction of our large, shaggy-barked woolshed, there seemed to rise hoots of convict amusement. I found that my hands were trembling on the reins, but I ascribed it to a feverishness I had that month.

It was a night and a day to Treloar’s boundary, and the first thing I saw on the ridge above Goldspink’s homestead, apart from some cattle and horses in the yard, was the strange sight of a nun sitting in brown habit in the shade of the verandah reading to a bare-breasted black woman wearing a sacking skirt. Goldspink, in the manner of the late Shegog, had clearly taken a housekeeper – a very young one too.

I rode hurriedly down, past the very handsome four-wheeler in which Phoebe had obviously been travelling. The young native woman was alarmed at my approach and ran inside to hide. The nun stood her ground as I dismounted and approached her. She seemed a handsome woman with a slight reddish coloration beneath her cheeks.

‘You wrote to me,’ I said. ‘I’m Bettany.’

‘Sister Catherine of the Cork congregation of the Sisters of Charity,’ she told me.

The nun looked no older than I was, and it was just as well she wore such a complicated and archaic garb, to cause Goldspink’s stockmen to think twice about offering her any insult. She was empowered by this same archaic dress, it seemed, to look me straight in the eye.

‘Your betrothed has a pneumonic fever,’ she said. ‘She came straight
from her ship over the mountains, came to us and cast herself on our care.’

‘Cast herself on your care?’

‘On our community. It seemed she was after being with the French nuns in Geneva, you see. So she sought us out without returning to her home.’ She held her hand up: enough questions. ‘Now I’m sure she will be the better for your visit, Mr Bettany.’ She led me at once into the hut. It was grey and cramped within, this interior I remembered from my first meeting with Felix. The native housekeeper kept a wary station by the fireplace, and Goldspink was not in sight. But at the other end of the hut, in an alcove screened by blankets and netting, lay Phoebe. The bark window flap behind her head was propped wide to admit air, and the lovely, sleeping, clearly much-matured Phoebe seemed by her rasping to be in need of that element. The nun had her dressed even at this distance in the bush, in the proper regalia of the ill: white linen, with a white linen bonnet around her head.

Though she was sick, she was – I was pleased to see – not anywhere near sick unto death. Her eyes had a blueness beneath them. Snow on a sad afternoon, I thought. I looked at her body beneath the sheet and saw she had become a taller woman in Geneva, by four or five inches. I took a nearly parental, anxious joy in that. Thinking her sleeping, I felt stunned when she reached out her hand and took mine. After my years in Nugan Ganway, her skin felt exquisitely delicate. Bark, leather, the fouled and burred and mud-matted coats of sheep were what I was accustomed to. This flesh was a manifestation from another universe. It partook of the utterly new, but what caused me to fall in love in the most unabstract way was the
habitual
way she reached for my hand, the habitual and playful way she tugged it, as if she’d reproved me for my reluctance to grab her fingers in the same way a hundred times in the past. Of course, I saw! That’s what Barley had meant by a rudder.

‘So you are now the great man of sheep and cattle,’ she said. The irony she spoke with was habitual too. It was in a way a
married
irony. I liked that, and seriously intended to taste more of it.

‘I am a man still struggling to be that. Where are your parents?’

‘A woman shall leave her family …’ she said, paraphrasing the Scripture.

‘No,’ I said. ‘The text says, “A
man
shall leave his family and cleave …”’ The hotness of the verb prevented me from finishing. I thought of Cecily for a second before banishing her forever.

‘Well, what’s good for the goose,’ she said.

‘Does your father know you’re here?’

‘Not here precisely,’ she said. I was aware that the nun was still present, and frankly enjoying her chaperone role and the secrets it brought her. ‘He told me all the slanders. It was my duty not to hear them. And I set off. But it is not as if I have abandoned the proprieties. I travelled with a nun,
á la mode Européenne
.’

‘You travelled too hard, my young friend,’ murmured Sister Catherine behind me. ‘You nearly had me with the pneumonic too.’

‘It is a total wonder that you came,’ Phoebe told me. ‘Yet I knew you would.’

But she was so young still, and I thought of Horace.

‘
Nondum subacta ferre iugum valet cervice, nondum munia comparis
…’ ‘She is not yet of such a strength as to bear the iron yoke of marriage, or the lustful weight of a rearing bull …’

Phoebe’s eyes translucently closed. She murmured on the edge of awareness, ‘I shall rest well now you have arrived.’

The nun gave a jerk of her head which told me to leave. One could well imagine her as a strong-minded farmwife. She seemed accustomed to being obeyed. So now we went outside again, past the screen and onto the verandah. Here we replenished our pannikins of tea. We had offered one to the so-called housekeeper, but she had shaken her head, gone outside and run away to the nearest tree and sat behind it, to get away from my gaze.

‘She thinks you have the evil eye,’ said Sister Catherine, much amused. ‘Just like at home. There’s nothing new amongst the poor fallen children of Eve.’ She looked levelly at me. ‘I would hope for Phoebe’s sake you have not taken a native woman into your house, Mr Bettany, as seems to be the habit of this country, men being such heedless souls.’

‘You can be assured,’ I said. But I was disarmed by her depiction of us.

‘You can imagine that after such a journey and so much conflict, with the pneumonic added in on top, that the girl has no need to confront that sort of thing.’

Her insistence stung me a little. ‘Neither she nor you will find anything in that regard. If it’s your business.’

‘My business or not, I’m pleased to hear it. But I’m sad to say it makes you an uncommon man in the bush. It strikes me that if we had more sisters, we should at once create a refuge in the bush for these dark
women most misused and least rewarded. But there’s only four of us in Goulburn, and we must see to our own convict women.’

‘You know the country?’

‘I know the lie of it and I have been escorting women to the outer stations before today. But on top, the good child offered us such a fee, and fees are very welcome with Mother Ignatius. Ever are we short of that quantity, and the bishop gives us nothing but a certain ration of his disapproval.’

‘Why disapproval?’ I asked

‘Ah,’ she said, waving her hand, ‘he is an English Benedictine, ever threatening to excommunicate us. He considers us disobedient women. The Canon Law, he says, and even the rules of our Order, require that we travel always in pairs, and we say, if there were eight of us, and the country small in extent, we would be happy to have a sister with us for prayer, correction and companionship. But the Canon Law was not written for us as we are in this country! We say we would obey it to the absolute letter if there had ever been a time like this before, or a place like this. Here the rules must yield to faith. We must go out ourselves, in solitary armour against all perils, and in the company solely of angels.’

I was still not utterly at ease with this turbulent nun who seemed to find both the world and the wilderness so legible. ‘Couldn’t it be said though that you encouraged her to defy her father?’

Sister Catherine stood up, whistled loudly as a farm girl to the housekeeper behind the tree and started waving her back towards us. The woman came only halfway back, and stood in the shade.

‘No,’ said the nun, sitting down to her pannikin of tea again, shrugging at her half-success with the native woman. ‘It could only be said that a young woman was determined to come south on her own resources, and even at the cost of her reputation, for she intended to visit you at your station. And so I accompanied her to give her the protection of my habit.’

‘She would have been safe in my company,’ I told the nun with some sullenness.

‘I’m sure,’ said the woman in return. ‘But would the world know that?’

I mulled over my tea. The native housekeeper returned to Sister Catherine by stealth, and the nun picked up the book of instruction from a bench on the verandah, a sort of primer she had brought with her in case she encountered ignorance which could be conquered. So the lesson began again.

I sat quietly and in increasing content. Sometimes I would yield to go
to the window flap and look in at the resting Phoebe, and linger there confidently above her fever. It was the breadth of what Phoebe had done which startled and compelled me. I have since seen that people are bound together by the power, the madness of what one or sometimes both of them have done for the sake of union. There was of course an inadequacy on my side, no breadth of gesture. I would not have had the strength to advise Phoebe to do what she had done, but now she
had
done it, I was a captive of her act, her grandeur. Her arrival here was in its scale like a vast transaction in acres given, livestock offered. It was enough to bind me and provide me with the founding landmark of our love. I did not so much fall in love as find myself claimed by it. Many young men looked to nature for symbols of their love, but to me the effects of nature seemed predictable and work-a-day when put beside what Phoebe had done at great cost to her bodily fabric, which was now recovering from the strain in Goldspink’s hut.

Later, I went in unimpeded by the nun and replaced a tepidly damp rag which sat on her brow with another one well-drenched in the bucket of cool creek water in the corner of the room. Goldspink had still not returned to sully the air in which these services were performed.

He came in later in the day with two of his stockmen who were nearly indistinguishable from the absconders. When he saw me he cursed them out of the house and made speeches about having the gentry indoors – myself, Phoebe – and what a welcome variation it provided, and what a charming feminine presence Sister Catherine was. ‘A woman,’ said Goldspink out of her hearing, ‘if a neutered one.’ He wiped his brow. ‘One wonders what she makes of a fellow.’

Phoebe was anxious to leave Goldspink’s uneasy shack, and within two days her pneumonic fever had passed. It was clear that she still meant to visit Nugan Ganway under Catherine’s guardianship, and so we started off, the nun driving the good four-wheeler in which she had brought Phoebe southwards, Phoebe in the back, on the cushions, wrapped in a blanket and smiling. Since I rode at her side, we could converse. I tried to speak to her about her father’s anger, building even now, surely.

‘He spoke of suing you for alienation of affections,’ she told me, her face unclouded. ‘My mother will not let him. My father says one thing and means another. There is a Biblical name for that. I am afraid it is “whited sepulchre”. I am not an ungracious daughter, am I? You probably think me one. But returning to New South Wales I felt at once that I must be saved from his house.’

‘But why? It’s a fine house. You would surrender it for the prospect of slab timber and bark?’

‘I do not find I can inhabit that house. I can’t say why, so you need not press me.’

To listen to her speak was to feel a moral giddiness and a fear at her ardour. Sometimes I wondered was she edging me towards some reckless act. But I was enchanted by the very sensation.

So we made our arrangements. After she had seen Nugan Ganway, and our raw pastures, she would go with the nun to visit her young friends Mr and Mrs Parslow who had a little sheep farm, far to the north, near the village of Braidwood. There she would make the church arrangements for our wedding, and inform me by letter, and I would make my way there.

The two women, Sister Catherine and Phoebe, spent a week at Nugan Ganway, sharing my hut while Long and I crowded in with Clancy and O’Dallow. The nun felt a natural sisterhood towards Long, for one could feel in him, beneath his bush aptitudes, the mighty engine of his soul, grieving and puzzling away, running like a huge river to the sea. She liked to tease his seriousness, unleashing in herself a kind of rustic flirtatiousness.

Phoebe was delighted by everything other women might find off-putting at Nugan Ganway. To her the smell of mutton-fat lamps seemed incense. When I think of her conversation that week I remember not words but a solidity of mutual purpose. I slept badly in my lath cot in O’Dallow’s hut. Separated from me by virginal starlight lay the true helpmeet, a woman to whom the necessary physical coarseness of Nugan Ganway in no way bespoke barbarism, but promise.

I was startled one evening, by the shearing shed in our circle of buildings, to observe Sister Catherine seated on a chair in the shade talking to the two absconders, who crossleggedly occupied a log. My impulse was to tell them to go – for it seemed that they knew more of what was afoot at Nugan Ganway than Nugan Ganway ever knew of them. It was also difficult to read their demeanour towards Sister Catherine. They looked up from beneath eyebrows which seemed at dusk to be hooded against a reality they would not be barbarous enough to speak of to the nun. But they also watched me pass, and speculated whether this was the day I would decide to move against them. All parties had known from the start that such a day would come. All parties were relieved that it was not yet. Consoled after a manner, they soon rode away into the long blue evening of my higher pastures.