Dorothy Eden (41 page)

‘Then why can’t she discuss it with her father if she must discuss it with someone? Anyway, it’s not a suitable subject for a girl. Gilbert, Jem will have to be dismissed.’

Gilbert stopped chuckling.

‘Hardly, my love.’

‘Isn’t this a dismissable offence? If Miss Chisholm hadn’t been too scared of me, or you, Adelaide would have been expelled.’

‘But she isn’t going to be, and neither is Jem going to be dismissed. Quite frankly, apart from any other consideration, I can’t do without him.’

‘So he is to escape scot-free?’ Eugenia demanded incredulously.

Gilbert eyed her narrowly. A faint cynical smile touched his lips.

‘If he were still serving a sentence I would give him a dozen lashes. Would that satisfy you?’

‘Gilbert! How can you!’

Eugenia, seeing a long-forgotten glint in his eyes, was overwhelmingly conscious of a memory she thought had grown too dim to bother her.

‘If you asked Jem to make a choice, I could predict he would take the lashes rather than dismissal. He has the makings of an outstanding vigneron. I refuse to lose him because of a schoolgirl prank. But I’ll speak to him. I promise you that.’

‘Only speak to him! Is that all?’

‘Yes,’ said Gilbert curtly. ‘That is all.’

D
EAREST SARAH
,

First, we are not so old-fashioned as you think. We are all now wearing bustles and six petticoats,
quite
unsuitable for this climate, and we have been learning to dance the polka. I should qualify that last assertion by saying that Kit and Adelaide are the polka enthusiasts. We had Sir Charles and Lady Mary Fitzroy staying here, together with their son George who took quite a fancy to Adelaide. But I daresay that was only a harmless flirtation. Adelaide is very headstrong. So different from Lucy. Although I fear for Lucy. She has such tender feelings. She has been pale and
triste
since the Governor’s visit, but when I ask her what is the matter she says nothing. It is growing pains, I suppose, though Adelaide never suffered in this way.

I wish I could bring both my girls to England. Gilbert has been hinting that if next year’s vintage is as good as this one was, we may really go. This journey now seems as unreal to me as a journey to the moon.

Now for some servants’ hall gossip. We have given Obadiah White and Emmy Dawson permission to marry. Then I hope they will work properly again, as they are hopeless in their present lovesick state. I still miss Peabody dreadfully. Obadiah is a diligent worker (when not gazing hopefully towards the house to see if Emmy will appear), but he has not Peabody’s touch of genius. It must be my imagination that none of the flowers have been so brilliant, or if it is not imagination the fault is due to the long dry summer.

As for the rest of the servants, Mrs Jarvis and Ellen are not on such good terms as they used to be. At least Ellen is inclined to sniff or avert her eyes when Mrs Jarvis appears, although she assures me they have not quarrelled. I suppose women living together for so long must sometimes get on each other’s nerves.

Gilbert, I am sorry to say, has been looking fatigued. He works such long hours among his vines, not seeming to realize that he is no longer young. He has had a nasty little ulcer on the back of his hand which refuses to heal. The doctor says he has seen afflictions of this nature, and he thinks they are caused by the hot sun. Gilbert must keep his hand covered when he is in the sun until the sore heals. He scorned going to a doctor until Mrs Jarvis added her persuasions to mine. She once saw this type of persistent ulcer in her early days in Sydney, and it had become quite serious. But of course the sufferer was an unfortunate convict who would have had no medical attention.

Our next important festivity at Yarrabee will be Kit’s coming-of-age ball. Gilbert wants to make it a very magnificent affair. Part of his reason for this is, as usual, his wine. He will be opening the claret laid down at Kit’s birth. So I really don’t know which will be being toasted, our son, or the Yarrabee vineyard. I wish, for my husband’s sake, that I could have grown more enthusiastic about wine-growing, but it is a profession so full of anxieties, one can never be at ease. And I regret to say that I have now seen enough of the effect of wine to have an obsessive dislike of drunkenness.

I have left my own small piece of news to the last. Not that it is much to relate, but I cannot help feeling ridiculously proud of it. I have been asked to lay the foundation stone of a school the Government is building in Parramatta. At last they are taking education seriously, and it seems as if my own efforts have helped slightly towards this. Hence the honour. My name will be inscribed on the stone. So whether I like it or not I will have a small permanent record in the history of the colonization of this country.

I really have tried to help all the forlorn and homesick new arrivals, especially the young women. I identify myself so much with them. No one who had not experienced it can imagine the enormity of cutting off one’s home ties and beginning life in a strange and often harsh country.

That spring Gilbert found the oldest section of his vineyard suffering from oidium. It was a disease of old age, he told Eugenia. ‘Something we all have in common,’ he said, looking at the small itching ulcer on his hand which still refused to heal. The vines would have to be rooted out and burnt.

‘Perhaps the same should be done to me.’ He laughed, the myriad wrinkles round his eyes deepening. But his eyes were still a brilliant blue, still sunny and charming when he was in an amiable mood. He had grown thinner and this suited him. There was a shadow of austerity in his face which Eugenia found moving. She could not tell him this because she had repressed her feelings for too long. She had become what he had wanted her to be, a poised composed woman in control of her emotions. He never knew how often her heart ached. For too many years he had been quite unobservant of her more subtle shades of feeling. He admired her, but didn’t
see
her, she would fume inwardly, and when her repressed emotions had to find an outlet, it was in an argument about the children or the vineyard.

Even when he began looking tired and she urged him to work shorter hours—after all he now had Kit to take over some of his duties—there had to be an argument.

‘The boy doesn’t show enough interest,’ Gilbert grumbled. ‘I can’t even trust him to bottle a cask of burgundy. I found he’d sealed all the corks without leaving enough air room. Jem had to do the job all over again. Jem makes ten of Kit, I’m sorry to say.’

‘He’s young. He doesn’t take life seriously yet,’ Eugenia said.

‘Then it’s time he did. At his age I had sailed round the world, and begun to clear my own land.’

‘Perhaps you should let him go off exploring for a year. That’s what he wants to do. Then I’m sure he would be glad to come home and settle down.’

The familiar obstinacy came to Gilbert’s face.

‘This is his place and here he will stay. I haven’t worked all my life to establish something that won’t be carried on. If I had more than one son, that would have been a different matter. But this is how it is, and this is the way it will remain.’

It was a worrying spring. A blight called black spot, or, more officially, anthracnose, appeared among the sauternes. Gilbert identified it with dismay. It had been a curse to viticulturists since the beginning of grape growing but until this season he had not encountered it. Sores and punctures appeared on the newly sprung leaves, making it certain that the vines would not bear fruit. The remedy, so the French said, was to puff sulphur over the afflicted area. Once again a tense exhausting fight took place.

The blight was contained in a relatively small area, by which time a herd of kangaroos had trampled through the southern corner of the vineyard, and completed their journey of destruction in Eugenia’s garden. She was awakened in the early morning by the great smoky grey creatures. She rushed on to the balcony and screamed at them. One, holding a pulled-up rosebush in his paws, stared at her blandly. Others took small leaps that landed them in the centre of the daffodil and hyacinth beds, or the newly planted borders.

At last the appearance of Emmy and Ellen on the verandah flapping aprons at them made them leave, sailing with effortless leaps over the shrubbery.

The garden was sadly wrecked. A flight of kookaburras settled in the fig tree and cackled with what seemed like macabre mirth. Erasmus screeched from his perch at the open window of Eugenia’s sitting-room. The morning was shattered with the raucous sounds. And Gilbert, coming in from inspecting the vineyard damage, had no sympathy to spare for the garden.

‘A few flowers! Grow some more.’

Then there was another disaster to relate to Sarah, a most distressing one. Lady Mary Fitzroy was killed in a carriage accident. The horses had run away, upsetting the carriage at a sharp bend in the road. Her husband, who had been driving, escaped serious hurt by clinging to the reins, but the A.D.C. seated beside him later died of his injuries. Lady Mary, that nice stout kindly lady, had been killed instantaneously.

It was a great tragedy. Eugenia did not wish Lucy to go to the funeral, but the child begged not to be left at home alone. She would keep seeing dear Lady Mary seated in the rocking chair on the verandah with her wool and her knitting needles, she said. Please not to leave her at home with a ghost!

Eventually it was decided that Adelaide and Lucy should wait at the cemetery gates, while Eugenia, Gilbert and Kit followed the sad procession to the vault where Lady Mary and the poor young A.D.C. were laid side by side.

They were not far from the ornate tombstone marking Mrs Ashburton’s grave. Peabody lay at the farther side of the burying ground.

Our baby sister’s grave is under that palm tree,’ Adelaide said, as if the blowing sand, and the small grey angel in the shade of the shaggy palm tree, hadn’t been known to Lucy from the beginning of her life.

One day, she thought, everybody at Yarrabee will lie here.

More and more people were arriving in the colony. Labourers, craftsmen, rich men in search of adventure, a considerable number of rogues who had fled before Newgate got them, and a few dissolute sons of great English or Irish families who found it more comfortable to have their embarrassing offspring on the other side of the world.

There were also professional men, scientists, engineers, botanists, geologists, who saw romance in participating in the birth of what one day must be a great country.

The white-sailed ships sailed into Sydney harbour, the travellers disembarked amid the usual chaos of baggage, lost children and fearful wives. Some remained in the towns because they were growing so fast and were full of opportunities. Or their wives were nervous of the immense heat-blanched spaces of which they had heard too much for their small reserves of courage. Others, more adventurous, wanted to start exploring at once. Most of them, especially the Irish, were hungry for land.

The most desirable types of new arrival were the ones who regarded the great continent, still largely unexplored, with its blazing sun and dust storms, its everlasting gum trees, and strange primeval animals, its noisy birds, kookaburras, currawongs, and fantastically-hued parrots, its sudden clouds of galahs like a pink feathered sunset, its endless stretches, mile after sun-bleached mile, its great rivers and mangrove swamps, its sheer fabulous immensity, as the biggest challenge in their lives. This was a land, they were told, that went back to an unbelievably antiquity. It was older than Egypt, older than Greece, older than Crete of the minotaurs. Old and new at the same time. And already there was a new race in the world who had never seen England or the continent of Europe.

The young Massinghams of Yarrabee, for instance. Yarrabee was becoming a known stopping place, whether the traveller was interested in vineyards or not. He would receive warm hospitality, drink Yarrabee wine, meet that charming and now famous hostess the elegant Mrs Massingham and, with luck, her good-looking daughters. Miss Adelaide who was friendly, freckle-nosed, bouncing, and Miss Lucy, much the prettier but extremely elusive. And dull, the young men who had contrived a conversation with her reported. She had nothing to say for herself. She might have the looks, but Addie had the vitality.

So what with old and new acquaintances, there was a long list of guests for Kit’s coming-of-age ball.

All the same, Kit and Adelaide were exasperating. Kit showed no interest in the very suitable young women Eugenia proposed inviting. Maud Kendall, daughter of Judge Kendall, was a charming young lady. So was Millicent Lyon, whose maternal grandfather was an earl. Bess Kelly’s daughter Alice had not yet found a husband. Kit laughed about her. ‘You wouldn’t marry me to dumb Alice, Mamma. A wife requires to speak sometimes.’ It seemed he didn’t want to be married to anyone. At least, not yet.

Adelaide was even more feckless. Her careless indifference had driven away that pleasant eminently suitable young man, George Fitzroy. News had just come of his interest in a young lady in Sydney. He would be unable to attend the Yarrabee ball.

Adelaide found that information quite diverting. Lucy, however, went pale and Adelaide cried cruelly, ‘Why, I do believe Lucy cherishes secret feelings for him. Are you in love with him, Lucy?’

‘Don’t be absurd! She’s far too young,’ Eugenia said. But the child’s face went red, then pale again, and the too ready tears filled her eyes.

‘Adelaide, don’t be a tease. You know how sensitive your sister is.’

‘If she’s old enough to fall in love,’ said Adelaide with logic, ‘she’s old enough not to blub like a baby.’

Kit came to Lucy’s defence. ‘Leave her alone, Addie. Wait until you know what it’s like to be in love.’

‘You sound as if you know a lot about it yourself, Christopher Massingham.’

‘Perhaps I do.’

‘Then pray,’ said Eugenia, ‘stop quarrelling and tell us who the young lady is so that we can include her among our guests.’

Kit raised blue eyes to look steadily at his mother.