After a supper of chicken soup and mutton pie, Clavell and Joe went outside to smoke and Ralph hung around, idly listening to their conversation about the price of sheep at market, then as his father went to make sure the outbuildings were secured for the night, he joined his godfather on the veranda.
‘Uncle Ralph?’ he said nervously. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Fire away, young man. What do you want to know?’ Ralph Clavell was tall and thin with a laconic sense of humour, and he always seemed well disposed towards his youthful namesake.
‘I had a fight with Edwin Boyle today,’ Ralph began.
‘Did you, by Jove! Well, that doesn’t surprise me. If he’s anything like his father he’ll bring out the worst in anybody. I remember Captain Boyle very well and so do your parents.’
‘He said – that his father had said that my mother was a whore. So I hit him.’
Clavell pursed his lips, though he didn’t appear to be shocked. ‘Good for you! Never let a man, or boy, for that matter, insult a woman, no matter who or what she is.’
‘So is it true?’ His voice was low, he was aware of his mother and Peggy just beyond the veranda wall. ‘Was she, I mean? Is that why she was a convict and sent to Australia?’
‘Women were not transported because of
making their living on the streets,’ Clavell responded with a frown. ‘That wasn’t a transportable offence, and I can tell you, young Ralph,’ he shook a finger at him, ‘that for some women that was the only way they could put food into their mouths.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But to your question. No, your mother was not a whore.’
He gazed out into the gathering darkness. Ralph, following his gaze, saw his father returning. Clavell’s voice dropped. ‘Meg was accused of slandering a magistrate and of theft, and transported for seven years. Both cases were subsequently proved to be untrue and she was pardoned. Your parents were not allowed to go back to England, but they wouldn’t have chosen to anyway. They knew that there was a better life here.’
Ralph nodded. That much he knew. His father was fond of saying that if he had stayed in England he would be either starving in the gutter or dead from hanging, instead of being one of the richest men in New South Wales.
When his father rejoined them Ralph went inside to his room and sat on the deep window sill and looked out over the land. Land which was covered with thousands of sheep. Land and sheep which would one day be his. Or at least, his and Peggy’s. His father insisted that everything they had would be shared equally. ‘We’ll have none of this English business where the son gets everything and ’daughter gets nowt but a dowry
on her marriage,’ he said time and time again. ‘Peggy will get her fair share and she can choose what she wants to do with it.’
He could see the curls of smoke drifting up from his father’s pipe and Uncle Ralph’s cigar and hear the murmur of their voices, then unmistakably he heard his godfather say, ‘You’re going to have to tell the boy something soon, Joe. That unprincipled wretch Boyle’s been stirring up trouble again. Ralph’s just been asking questions about his mother.’
‘
IF I WERE
a boy I could go to sea like Papa does,’ Amelia muttered, and tossed her thick brown hair out of her eyes as the wind caught it and flew it streaming flag-like about her head. She and her mother and father, brother Roger and younger sister May were picnicking on the sands at Spurn Point, the low-lying narrow finger of sand and shingle which ran between the mouth of the Humber and the German Ocean.
Amelia had run up the dunes for a better sight of a sailing ship leaving the pilot boat in the river and heading out on its own to greet the swirling waters of the sea. ‘It’s not fair. Girls have such boring lives.’
Her father, Philip Linton, coming up after her, heard her last remark and said jovially, ‘Not at all true. Just ask your mother.’
‘Oh no, Papa! Not like that. Not like poor Mama! But I would like to sail a ship.’
‘When you are older, in a couple of years or so, then you can come on a voyage with me.
Your mother would like to do that too.’ He smiled at his nine-year-old tomboy daughter. She should have been the boy instead of Roger. Roger was happy with his farming studies and wandering over the land, observing the wildlife and poring over his books on birds and animals. Even now he had wandered off in the hope of finding some rarity. Amelia wanted adventure and only a year ago had cut off her hair and squeezed her plump little bottom into a pair of her brother’s trousers and announced that she was going to run away and join a fishing smack at the Hull docks.
Her father had volunteered to take her down to the docks to watch the fishermen bringing in their catch from the trawlers. She saw the ragged, barefoot, barechested apprentice lads hauling on the heavy fish baskets, and this and the stench of fish and the squirming slippery cod and haddock had so turned Amelia’s stomach that she had changed her mind, for the present, she’d said, and would take a merchant ship when she was older.
‘I’d like to go to Australia to meet my cousins,’ she pouted. ‘I’m sure they have more fun than we do here. England is so stuffy!’ and she kicked out at the spiky marram grass with her neatly laced boots.
‘You’ve been spoilt, Amelia.’ Her father’s tone was impatient and she looked up at him anxiously. He didn’t often get cross. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are to live the life you do.
To have plenty to eat, a warm bed to sleep in, everything you could possibly want!’
She hung her head. ‘I’m sorry, Papa. I do know really and I’m not unhappy, it’s just that I want to
do
something. Something exciting.’
Roger called to them. He was crouching over something on the shingle. ‘Here! Come and look. I’ve found a yellow horned poppy!’
Amelia raised her eyebrows and sighed, and was relieved to hear her mother and Ginny, their housekeeper, who had prepared the food and accompanied them, call to them to come and eat.
Later in the day they tramped back along the rough track of the peninsula with their wicker baskets, hampers and blankets towards the carriage which was waiting for them at Kilnsea. Amelia walked at her mother’s side whilst her father carried five-year-old May on his back and Roger still searched along the banks for rare plants or looked into the hedges for birds’ nests.
‘It’s been a nice day, Mama, I’m sorry I was such a crosspatch this morning.’
Her mother looked down at her and then stopped to take a breath and Ginny tutted and took a basket from her, muttering that Mrs Linton shouldn’t be exerting herself or walking so far in her condition. A baby was due in three months’ time, but Emily Linton was strong physically and mentally. Not for her a proper ladylike kind of life; she had been through too
much to let a natural event deter her from being with her family.
Emily Linton looked after the management of the estate with her relative Samuel, who supervised the physical side, but she also drove out in her trap every week to visit the farms and smallholdings and talk over any problems with the tenant farmers. She had built up a respect from the workers on her land and from the neighbouring landowners, though not always from their wives, who tittle-tattled amongst themselves about her past life. But she cared not for their regard, she had the love of her husband Philip and her children and the devotion of her house staff in whose eyes she could do no wrong.
‘You must try to learn patience, Amelia,’ she said gently. ‘We are so lucky with what we have. People are starving all over the country, they have no work and nowhere to live. Think of them next time you are feeling grumpy.’
‘I do try, Mama,’ Amelia sighed. ‘I think perhaps I’m not a very nice person.’
‘You’re a very nice person.’ Her mother took her hand. ‘You’re just growing up, that’s all, and it’s difficult, no matter who you are.’
‘Papa says we can go with him on a voyage when I’m older. Could we go to Australia to see Ralph and Peggy and Uncle Joe and Aunt Meg?’
Her mother laughed. ‘Australia is much too far away. You’ve forgotten about the new baby! I wouldn’t want to take a young baby on such a
long voyage.’ She grew thoughtful, and then added softly, ‘Though there were many who did, and survived.’
‘If I went to Australia I should look for rare plants like Sir Joseph Banks did when he went with Captain Cook.’ Roger cradled a pale blue egg in his hand and showed it to his mother. ‘I only took one,’ he said, ‘there were others.’
‘Sam says you shouldn’t take any,’ his mother admonished him. ‘You know how cross he gets when you steal birds’ eggs.’
‘I shall go on an adventure into the bush when I’m there,’ Amelia broke in, ‘or else go digging for gold. I’ll bring you a nugget back if you like, Ginny,’ she added. ‘Then you’ll have a piece of your own to polish.’
Emily Linton and Ginny exchanged glances and smiled. Only Ginny of all the servants knew the worth of the small rough chunk of brown and yellow mud-like substance which lay on the mantelpiece in the drawing room and which she wiped reverently every morning with a soft cloth.
‘Shall we go soon?’ May piped up from her father’s back, ‘and will it be a big ship like you sail in, Papa?’
‘It would have to be a big ship, May,’ her father said, ‘and no, it won’t be soon. It will be years and years and years, if in fact at all.’
He glanced across at his wife. She badly wanted to see her brother again and his wife, Meg, and their children. But whether she would dare to make the voyage to the other side of
the world, remembering, as she was bound to, the first time she had sailed to Australia, was another matter altogether. But she would have to, if family ties ran strong within her. For her brother could never visit her. In spite of his wealth, Joe was banished from England for ever.
‘
I CAN’T TELL
him about his mother,’ Joe Hawkins had said to Ralph Clavell all those years before, as they’d smoked on the veranda. ‘Meg will have to.’
But Meg couldn’t either. She couldn’t bring herself to discuss the matter with her much loved son. So it was never mentioned again, though it hung silently as a shadow between them all. Not until over ten years later, when Ralph had quarrelled with his father about staying out carousing all the night and, as his father said, not doing his fair share of work on the estate.
‘We could afford to get more paid help,’ Ralph grumbled defiantly. His head ached and he would have liked to go back to bed. ‘We don’t have to work all the hours of the day and night! We’re supposed to be rich but what good does it do us?’
Joe grabbed him by his shirt. Meg had said something similar when she’d complained of him never being at home except for meal times
and bed. ‘We’re not born wealthy like those “Exclusives,”’ he said. ‘We’re from working stock! It’s how I was brought up by my da and he by his. It’s in my blood. Where I come from if tha doesn’t work, starvation stares thee in ’face.’
Sometimes, when he was angry, his Yorkshire dialect came to the fore. Ralph could see and hear that he was angry now and he backed off. ‘I’m sorry, Da. I know that’s how it was in the old country. But it’s not like that here. You can afford to take time off. You could take Ma out sometimes. You could visit other places. See something of the country. She’d like that. And I could take over, if only you’d let me.’
Joe stared at him. ‘I couldn’t ever explain to you how it is. There’s a compulsion inside of me that says I have to work.’ His voice dropped. ‘You could never know, never having experienced it, but I have this terrible fear, deep inside of me, that if I don’t work I might lose everything and finish up back in ’gutter.’
‘But you won’t,’ Ralph insisted. ‘You can’t possibly spend all the money you’ve got.’
His father shook his head. ‘I’ve just said! You’d never understand. You’ve never been without. You ask your ma. She’ll tell you ’same.’
‘Your father won’t change,’ his mother said when he spoke to her later. ‘I keep trying to persuade him to take some time off. It was hard in the old days, Ralph. No-one who hasn’t experienced those times could possibly
understand. There were those of us who were so low we were trailing our chins in ‘gutter.’
‘Ma,’ he said in a low voice as the memory of an old insult returned. ‘What did you do to survive? Before you were sent to Australia, I mean?’
He wished he hadn’t asked. He saw the misery and shame on her face before she turned her head away and answered. ‘I never thought I’d have to tell you. I allus hoped that it would stay hidden.’
‘Then don’t!’ He faltered and reached for her hand. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry!’
‘No!’ She lifted her head and there was a proud, defiant look in her eyes. ‘I’ll tell you. You’re a grown man, it’s time you knew. I wanted to survive and there was onny one way for women like me who had come from nothing. I never knew my father and I went ’same way as my mother. I worked ’streets of Hull, my home town. I was a street woman!’
He felt cold all over and he swallowed hard. So it was true. Edwin Boyle and his father hadn’t been lying all that time ago, but Uncle Ralph had. ‘And – and so, is Da my real father?’ He could hardly bring himself to ask the question. He suddenly felt dirty and vulnerable. ‘Or don’t you know who he was?’ He didn’t mean to sneer but it seemed to him that that was how it must have sounded.
Meg answered slowly. ‘I never wanted you to know, though your father – Joe, he always said
we should tell you. But there never seemed to be a right time.’
‘So he isn’t my father!’ He felt as if he had been punched. I’m a bastard! And I thought I was so grand.
‘No, he isn’t your father.’ She took a deep breath and her eyes filled with tears. ‘And neither am I your mother.’
He was more shocked by the revelation that Meg wasn’t his mother than he was over anything else. This was something quite unexpected and he ran from the room like a child and was physically sick. Meg came after him and cradled his head in her lap and told him that she couldn’t have loved him more even if she had given birth to him. ‘But Peggy is yours,’ he said jealously. ‘I can remember her being born.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She is, but we’ve never treated you any different. You were my son, mine from ’very beginning.’