Authors: Keneally Thomas
Phoebe jumped up. ‘I’ll get you a cup,’ she announced, making for the sideboard. But something impalpable stopped her in her tracks, as if the task were beyond her. Had the great and glorious barbarity of Nugan Ganway reached and overwhelmed her in that second?
‘Oh my dear,’ I said with both a smile and conviction, ‘isn’t this precisely why we need a maid and housekeeper?’
Nonetheless I was a little mystified and concerned as I got up, took her by the elbow and helped her back to the table, and then fetched the cup and saucer myself. It was Spode china I had ordered from Sydney as a sign of our increasing capacity for refinement. I should announce here
too that candles and whale-oil lamps now lit the interior of my household. Decent furniture – a bed, a table, a desk, a bookcase – had been brought in over time by Finnerty’s wagons, and an extra slab timber bedroom appended to the one room which Long and I had previously occupied. I had set Clancy to work lining this nuptial room with pages from the London illustrated papers, so that the eye might equally be caught by the visage of Lord Melbourne or ‘A Vista of the Highlands’ or ‘A View of Vauxhall Gardens’. Thus we now had bedroom as well as a parlour-cum-dining room.
So I left Phoebe in her chair, in her sweet redolence and temporary silence, and turned towards the not unpleasant, honest and horsy combination of odours from Purler’s uniform.
‘How can it be?’ asked Phoebe suddenly, and I could see now that she was very forlorn. ‘My friend Catherine is gone.’
‘The nun?’ I asked, though I knew precisely whom she meant.
‘I have been under insistent pressure from her superior to make inquiry,’ said Purler, ‘into the whereabouts of that nun who was sent south here with your wife. She has not returned to Goulburn. It was presumed by some that she stayed in the bush or fled to Sydney for …’ Purler seemed embarrassed, ‘… for propriety’s sake.’
‘What do you mean, propriety?’
‘Well, when the chief nun began to complain, I fear the Goulburn authorities may have thought, “The woman has fled, has found a man.” But the chief nun went on haranguing, and so inquiries were made in Goulburn, Yass, Parramatta, Sydney. But the woman couldn’t be found there. And so I was asked to search the country where she was last seen, and Mrs Bettany has told me the circumstances of her parting with the woman.’
I reached and took Phoebe’s pale hand. She murmured to me, ‘It was my insistence that she come here.’
For Phoebe’s sake I defended Catherine. ‘She was sure of herself and her life,’ I told the magistrate. ‘She is not suddenly an absconder from what she believes so thoroughly.’
‘You mention absconders. I’ve heard from Treloar there are two absconders, are there not, domiciled somewhere in the mountains beyond?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Rowan and Brody. It is the first time I have had any word or question concerning them from anyone in an official position.’
‘Were you expecting some word?’
‘Some years ago I suspected them of perhaps using and then poisoning a native woman. And of having tried to drown her child.’
‘Is this true?’ asked Phoebe, her green eyes widening. This was an awful shock to her image of our Australian Arcady. Until now, she probably believed she had encountered the extremes of vice chiefly in her Geneva classmates, in the young men who climbed the wall, and perhaps in unreliable Goldspink. She might think poorly of her father, but his wealth had kept her safe from the realities of the penal colony.
‘But some of your fellows here, to whom I spoke, tell me these men come down to your place to shear.’
‘That’s right,’ I admitted bravely. How could that be understood by a man who lived within limits of the sanctioned world, at Goulburn? ‘I reported the death of the native woman to your predecessor Magistrate Gonfleur at Goulburn some years ago. He laughed at me, or more accurately at the possibility of doing anything.’ I was becoming angry, and that was a sign that at some level of my mind I had always considered my relations with the outlaws to be improper. Nonetheless, I kept attacking. ‘After all, in the case of Rowan and Brody, the law has been very late in making an appearance. And I can say of them this. In some ways they are less sly, and almost – one could say – more honest than men such as Goldspink.’
‘Well, Treloar likes him not for his character but because he has done a good pastoral job,’ said Purler. ‘Mr Treloar has many interests, and is more concerned, I’d say, in a chap’s capacity to keep shepherds and stockmen in order than in his moral fibre. And it seems that, like you, Goldspink welcomed the absconders, Rowan and Brody.’
I felt a surge of irritation at being associated with Goldspink, as if I were an equally chancy source of information.
‘These associations – I’ll say it again – they began before the government of Great Britain or of New South Wales recognised the existence of Nugan Ganway or Treloar’s Bulwa Mountain. They are not chosen arrangements. They have been forced upon us by the peculiar nature of what we are doing, without the benefit of advice from magistrates.’
Magistrate Purler drew his chin in and sat back. ‘I can assure you I am not unacquainted with the circumstances under which this country was occupied, Mr Bettany.’
I looked at this man, probably an English gentleman farmer’s son with a grammar school education, who now exercised in a most distant wing
of New South Wales the blunt and not particularly refined power to sentence recalcitrant convicts to fifty lashes, to return women to the Female Factory, and, if he could find them, to return absconders to a fierce retribution. I had to admit, though, there was a worldly understanding in the way with which he had dealt with my momentary vexation.
‘Catherine. That’s the question. Where is she?’ said Phoebe, dragging Purler and myself back to the real issue. Then Phoebe uttered a sentiment which could equally be applied to herself as to the nun. ‘Her faith was so simple that one can’t bear to think of her coming to harm.’
The police magistrate looked at me, and I could now see that he knew more than he was saying.
‘Goldspink,’ he murmured, ‘who buys illegal moonshine from the absconders, and perhaps the occasional other person’s cattle, said that he saw them recently, that they arrived in a four-wheeler. I asked him, where would they get a four-wheeler? He told me that he never inquired too closely into anything concerning them, he made points not dissimilar to your own, but did so with more heat and less grace than you have shown, Mr Bettany. He says he saw them go off then, one of them driving the four-wheeler, the other riding beside him and leading a horse. So they vanished. He had feared they had got the vehicle from you, but knew the dangers of questioning them too closely on that.’
I told the magistrate that I had not owned a four-wheeler until a little time before the wedding. Magistrate Purler gave out a huge sigh over his tea cup. ‘A four-wheeler might not be very serviceable where they were going, in the wild mountains. Perhaps they had a buyer in mind. Perhaps they merely meant to take it out of our sight.’
‘Please,’ said Phoebe, standing, her hands trembling, ‘I shall make more tea.’
We both said no need, but could see that she wanted to be busy. She went out to our primitive bark kitchen.
‘Spode china,’ Purler murmured to me, smiling without malice. ‘And yet the young lady insists on doing all her own work.’
‘She is involved in her bush idyll, Mr Purler, God bless her. It takes a little time to find out that there are serpents in the garden.’
‘Oh, that there are. I chose not to tell you this while your wife was here. One of my native trackers of the border police has already indeed found the nun’s body high up in the direction of Mount Bimberi beyond Mount Bulwa. She was many weeks deceased, her clothing was scattered,
and according to Doctor Alladair of Cooma Creek her neck had been broken. Either she had been taken there and killed or killed elsewhere and thrown there!’
I groaned and called to dear God, all the useless utterances of a bereavement. That this good woman could come all this way voluntarily on a convict transport and die horribly on a distant, unearthly mountain.
‘What did you do with the remains?’ I asked, knowing as if by instinct how important such a consideration would have been for Catherine.
‘Perforce we had to bury them where they lay,’ Purler told me. ‘We lacked lead-lined coffins and such. I believe that this woman’s sisters in Goulburn are quite desolate and will later translate it to Goulburn, since they think the nun a martyr of the new country.’
So now I began to calculate the culprits. Could it have been the Moth people who had attacked and desecrated handsome Catherine? That was not likely, I thought. It might have been one or other of Goldspink’s shepherds, and Goldspink himself had the credibly sly fury in him to do it. But he said he had seen the absconders with a four-wheeler. Their possible guilt must be tested as a first option.
‘We must watch Goldspink,’ I told Purler, ‘but above all we must find Rowan and Brody.’
I realised that this was the long-delayed business pending for Nugan Ganway. Though the Captain and Tadgh had often enough discovered me, I knew that the day would come when I must discover them. I wanted very much to weigh in their presence the question as to whether they had ravaged and killed the dedicated Catherine.
‘You will assist with your men?’ Purler asked.
‘I will assist. Two of them speak the same tongue as the absconders.’
We agreed that with three of my men – Long, Clancy, Presscart – I would meet him and his border police at Treloar’s at noon in three days time. That much was easy to organise. The hard thing came after Purler, refusing my hospitality for the night and wanting to rejoin his border police detachment, rode away and left me to go to our bark and slab kitchen and tell Phoebe that her friend and fellow pilgrim had been found murdered and misused. Phoebe had been cooking lamb by the recipe out of a book named
Food Selection and Preparation
, and now she kept absentmindedly basting while looking at me with mute horror. I stressed murder, rather than rape. I told her I must join the search for the killers. But O’Dallow would stand watch at Nugan Ganway. She had nothing to fear. With summer ended, the Moth people were gone.
‘I am not afraid of the Moth people anyhow,’ she told me through tears. I felt her desolation: the great adventure of her marriage, the story designed to one day enchant grandchildren, had turned on her like a cunning device. The decent impulses of adventure which had united two such different women as herself and Catherine and were driven by her brave blood and imagination had helped produce this obscene and dreadful result.
She insisted on cooking the lamb superbly, as lamb had never before been cooked on Nugan Ganway, but then ate none of it. I ended in taking it to the men, who fell on it with eager appetite. I found Phoebe waiting for me on the verandah when I returned, gave her some brandy, helped her to our bed and kept strong hold of her hand as she closed her eyes on a world she had thought, till this afternoon, to be the landscape of assured happiness.
Three days later I arrived with Long and Presscart at Goldspink’s homestead to find a detachment of border police and a black tracker – a native man of diminutive size recruited from some other region, dressed in blue coat and breeches but utterly barefoot – all under the overall command of Purler. But also on the verandah sat my friend Peske, in his green Land Commissioner’s jacket.
‘Awful business, old man,’ he called with an absolutely contented smile. ‘I trust it hasn’t distressed your dear little girl too much.’ His coat was hung about with two bandoliers and a cartridge belt, and he looked fit to munition the entire expedition.
Everybody was of sober demeanour and Purler seemed to have taken on a higher seriousness than he had displayed at Nugan Ganway, and certainly a more intense air of command. Goldspink was bustling about, boiling water for tea, but booted and ready to ride himself. He suggested to Purler that this was an hour and an expedition where a little spirits might have been forgivable or even to be advised. But Purler, enormous in his uniform and sheepskin coat, ignored him.
‘We have two trackers,’ Peske told me, his persistent good humour and blitheness making me doubt his good sense. ‘Friend Purler’s first chap is already out along the trail of these rogues a little. These Waradgery trackers are utter wizards. They can sort out trace from trace, and from right here in the yard the fellow picked precisely the tracks Goldspink reported – a four-wheeler, two horses, one led, one ridden.’
He settled back, utterly happy with every aspect of the colony and its gradual reaching out for absconders and like anachronisms.
Indoors, we supplemented the mutton in our saddlebags with some of Goldspink’s fresh damper, and by the time I got out into the yard, a tall tracker was there, returned from his reconnaissance, a great frown on his long flat forehead as he talked to Purler.
‘I find ’em, Mr Purler,’ I heard him say. ‘Goan off toward them fellers there.’ And the ‘fellers’ he pointed to were the tangle of mountains almost directly west – quite credibly so, since it was a stretch of country named the Kiandra, whose ownership was uncertain, whose precipitous gorges we avoided, and towards which even Long’s attitude, if he suspected cattle had wandered somewhere in that locality, was very nearly one of resignation.
‘They couldn’t get a four-wheeler up there,’ I heard Peske say.
At last we set off behind Purler’s trackers, who rode barefooted in their police pants and engaged in a sort of shy collaboration at the head of our party. I rode Hobbes, who still served me and was now a mature beast of eight years, and had learned a kind of endurance and patience, I believed, not common in the horses of Van Diemen’s Land. On gradually rising ground, first open, then wooded, the trackers would pause now and then to drop to the ground and discuss matters in the brisk, elliptical language which sounded like that of the Moth people but which was very likely different.
According to the trackers the two absconders had somehow got the four-wheeler up here, bouncing its ironbound wheels over rocks. At dusk the trackers led us to the edge of the ridge we were then on and pointed out to us the wreckage of the four-wheeler at the bottom of the drop. Purler and one of the trackers climbed down to it. ‘No horse down here,’ Purler called to us, though we could see that already. So they had taken the horse out of its traces and pushed the dray over the edge, giving up the crazy struggle with the terrain. After further conference at the top of the ridge, the police trackers told us that after the vehicle had been pushed into the abyss, the three horses had continued along the ridge, two horsemen leading the carriage horse.