I turned Hobbes about and rode back down to him. As I went I felt a strange delight that the little fellow was not lost to me. I was reclaiming him with a new seriousness of intent now. As I neared he stood up. I had only permissively to pat Hobbes’s crop, and the small, grinning, humourless, homunculus, the child of unimagined gods, was with a fluid action lodged in front of me again in the saddle, and tucked into my body.
At noon some days later, we reached at last that excellent and happy household of Mr Finlay of Goulburn, where I waited for Charlie Batchelor to arrive back from the west, having left a message for him as arranged at Mandelson’s Hotel. I would happily have recruited Felix into this instructive company. But he was rather younger than Finlay’s son, and I did not know what the father would have thought of joining the English child with the native child. I left the boy therefore with the Finlays’ Irish cook. She seemed pleased to have him, and promised to look after him over the next few nights, though she asked me, ‘Whatever is it wrong with the little feller’s face there, sir?’
Going to the house, I waited for handsome Mrs Finlay to rise from her afternoon rest and for Mr Finlay to return from a visit to one of his outlying stations. I contemplated setting out to report the death of a native woman to the police magistrate. But it would be better to wait for Mr Finlay to introduce me, as the magistrate would treat my story seriously if I came recommended.
Aimless for now, I stumbled into the library looking for something to read, and saw the daughter and the little son of the household being tutored. As I went to withdraw, the fair-haired daughter, Phoebe, left her seat and rushed to me, taking me by the wrist.
‘Monsieur Juneau,’ she said to the tutor, who stood watching her tiredly. ‘Nous avons un visiteur. Monsieur Juneau, permettez moi de vous presenter Monsieur Bettany. Monsieur Bettany, Monsieur Juneau.’ Juneau, who wore a butternut, rough-woven suit and no neckcloth must have been one of the Canadian prisoners, the rebels of Quebec, whom many householders sought to employ to teach their colonial children the rudiments of French. ‘Monsieur Bettany est un Vandemonien,’ the beautiful but forthright girl told her harried convict teacher. My father had begun, like him, as a teacher of free children. ‘Not a citizen of Van Diemen’s Land,’ I corrected her, lest she lead me ill-equipped into a morass of French. ‘I am a citizen of New South Wales now. What’s that? Nouveaux Galles de Sud?’ Indeed, the hope of my land lay more warmly and certainly in me than the last time I had seen her.
Soon Mr Finlay intended to send these children away from him – he had spoken of Harrow for his son and for his daughter a Swiss finishing school. I wondered if they would do better there than they would with sad-eyed Juneau, who had the face of a cultivated man.
On his return, I found that Mr Finlay had kindly invited people to dinner to meet me, and was pleased to hear that one of them would be Mr Gonfleur, the police magistrate, and his wife. Gonfleur, as it turned out, was an older man with a kind of opaque humour in his face and, from the way he talked, half an eye on planned return and retirement to Norfolk. Mrs Gonfleur too pined for the fens. They wanted quit of the country I had only just found! I looked for an opportunity to alert Mr Gonfleur to the murder of Felix’s mother but was interrupted by the arrival of Charlie Batchelor. He was better dressed than I, who wore the same trousers I had worn on my ride, with one of Mr Finlay’s borrowed coats and my spare boots. In his compact, olive handsomeness, his colonial wiriness, Charlie was a robust sight.
We sat almost at once to dinner, drinking claret from Finlay’s own vineyard. The men at table questioned me about the land I had located, and Charlie listened keenly to what I said on that. But they, as complimentary as they were of my efforts, moved quickly to Charlie and his search for a property to the west. It was ever thus in New South Wales that whomsoever you met, you could always work up a conversation about land and livestock. As Charlie answered, he engaged my eye and smiled at me. ‘Jonathan,’ he told me, ‘I have not yet found the property I wanted but I have used my capital to purchase three thousand ewes. I’ve put them out with two settlers, north in the Bathurst area, and at Menai, for three years. I have of course enough in reserve to stock your place, Jonathan. It’s the best thing to do while prices are high and while I look further west. My Menai gentleman, MacLean—’
‘Captain Maclean of Menai?’ asked Mr Finlay, in his voice the measure of approbation for which Charlie was looking.
‘Yes, and Barton of the Bathurst region. And of course I have my joint effort at this …’
I could not believe he had forgotten the name of the land I had found. That it did not have for him the nature of an essential password.
‘These fellows you’ve left your stock with, they are trustworthy men?’ I asked, as much to annoy him or bring him back to himself as anything else. ‘After all, Charlie, we know nothing of this colony.’
Mr Finlay and his friends were laughing. ‘Do you think these men are absconders or ticket-of-leave men, Mr Bettany? No one would dare say they did not keep exact stock books. Well-kept stock books are the basis of most New South Wales friendships and of New South Wales honour. There’s little enough honour anywhere else, the dear God knows.’
Everyone at table was willing to chuckle at my doubts about Charlie’s stock holders, Captain McLean and Mr Barton, who had honour other sections of the populace lacked. Mr and Mrs Gonfleur, Mr and Mrs Finlay, and Charlie all shared in this communion of honour, and it seemed to me their laughter was the laugh of free people against convict people, and against their offspring, if I chose to have sensitive feelings, which I had taken a vow to prevent myself ever indulging in. For my mother had always been careful to instruct me that my father, though rash, had a nobility of impulse which transcended the banalities of trading which characterises free settlers. He was thus higher, not lower, than many an aimless free settler who stumbled upon colonial wealth, and as a result of that happy accident imitatively adopted the rituals of an honour which was not innate. Captain Maclean? Was captain such a dazzling rank? It was, I thought, losing my head a second, a characteristic New South Wales one – the bush was scattered with captains, but rarely with colonels and never with generals.
‘And a man might always inspect their books,’ said Charlie now, adopting his mode of being the hard-headed Australian. ‘Just in case their English honour overlooks a few strays.’
But this was all right. All chuckled. A gentleman could make jokes about a colonial gentleman’s shavings and dodges! But then I calmed myself. This joke of Charlie’s, I thought, was the sort of daring witticism he had acquired from my father, his tutor, from my father’s version of that great surviving spirit, Horace, which could flame first under one dispensation – republican – then under another – imperial, and be a man under both. Charlie’s observation suddenly made me at home at this table of men who pretended they were something more elevated than in fact was the case. What would Mr Gonfleur be, returned to England? A man who had held an obscure job in an obscure colony, and – very likely – never stopped boring people about it. And Charlie subtly knew this, and the reason he knew it was my father’s urbanity as a tutor.
‘And are you all spent out?’ I asked Charlie as a joke.
‘It depends what you have for us, Jonathan. Tell me. This place of yours …’
I did not answer at once, and the table looked at me. I began. ‘Some one hundred and sixty miles south of this spot, beyond the land occupied by Mr Treloar, lies a huge, high natural pound of at least two hundred square miles in extent. It is good open pasture scattered with boulders and seems to me particularly suited for sheep. It is bounded by some creeks of the Murrumbidgee River on the north, and its natural limit is set only by snowclad mountains which separate it, or so I presume, from the Port Phillip regions beyond.’
‘And how high is this pasturage?’ asked Charlie, his eyes alight.
‘A little more than two thousand feet, I am told.’ It was a guess but proved a surprisingly accurate one. ‘The lank
kangaroo grasses in profusion. Native herbs and sedges. I would assess it to be excellent sheep country though capable of frost, even sometimes in summer.’ I remembered the wetness of Goldspink’s home yard the morning Felix was hauled from the stream. ‘As for cattle, well, cattle are hardy, as they say.’
Mrs Finlay suddenly spoke from her ignored place at the table’s end. ‘This country has made a profound impression upon you, Mr Bettany.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I feel that though I have just seen it, I have blazed its trees and feel it is the country of my heart.’
‘Bravo,’ she said. ‘Not too many other men can make such a happy assertion.’
‘Yes indeed,’ said Mr Finlay. ‘You have made a mighty ride.’
‘And seen things,’ I announced, as if preparing Mr Gonfleur, ‘not usually encountered.’
At last the two women dutifully withdrew, and we who had stood for their departure stretched luxuriously and yawned. Loosening his neckcloth, Mr Finlay fetched port from the sideboard and we gathered to one end of the table.
‘Mrs Finlay tells me you brought a little sable chap in on your pony,’ remarked Mr Finlay, pouring.
‘I have been waiting all night to talk to Mr Gonfleur of this,’ I admitted with relief. I related how I had found the boy’s mother, and promised Mr Gonfleur that with the help of Goldspink I could lead him to the absconders to whom the responsibility for her death could credibly be affixed. Mr Gonfleur held up both hands crossed at the wrist, a gesture designed as if to halt charging horses.
‘My young friend. I must say I believe we are years from the first successful prosecution for the murder of a native woman, regrettably common as that phenomenon might be. We are indeed years from placing a magistrate in the area in which your alleged murder occurred. This is not Van Diemen’s Land, neat as a nut and nicely contained. First you, the groundbreaker, sir! And then some years or decades after you, we hope, the institutions and the reach of law.’
‘So I am to let them go free, in the same reach of country as I inhabit?’
‘I admire your refined conscience, Mr Bettany. I too consider the killing of a native to be murder. But how to sheet it home to fellows? And could it not equally have been one of Treloar’s shepherds?’
I told him they had tried to drown Felix before they departed Treloar’s.
‘Well,’ he said, and I could gauge his frustration as an official of the system of justice, ‘I am sad to tell you they are far down the list of matters to be attended to. There are enough such murders within my district. I have had two ticket-of-leave women strangled by some evil chap in the past month. I shall deny this was ever said. But if you are aware of the genuine guilt of these fellows, perhaps when you are established you could arm your men and take your own recourse.’
There was a low, sputtering laugh from Mr Finlay. But I found I was reluctant to let the serpent of the spoiled blood of the Captain and Tadgh into my new-found garden.
‘But if nothing can be done for the mother, what is one to do with the child?’ I asked.
‘You might take him to clergymen, who locate such cases.’
‘I am not sure …’
‘Well, if you’ve developed an affection for the little savage, we have a most reforming schoolmaster here in Goulburn might take him. Advertises in the Vindicator.’
‘Hugely pious,’ Mr Finlay remarked, suddenly a little drunk. ‘Name of Loosely. He takes the children of thieves and promises them peerages, or at least a seat in the Commons.’
‘I think such a pedagogic policy is splendid, Johnny,’ Charlie suggested to me with a wink. ‘Send your little Negrito chap there!’
Later I would think that it is often in our lightest moments and with casual remarks that we summon up real eventualities. Sore-headed in the morning, I was pleased to find a copy of the rather Whiggish, emancipist Vindicator in the breakfast room, and looked for notice of Mr Loosely’s school. I read:
Modern Evangelical School,
Mr Matthew Loosely (MA, Oxon.), former Secretary, Anti-Slavery Society, Bristol; Corresponding Secretary, Prison Reform Society, London, is pleased to announce the commencement of a Grammar School designed for both colonial and English-born students, conducted according to the principles of the Common Book of Prayer and deploying a curriculum which includes, as well as the study of the Classics, due attention to History, Natural Science, Deportment and Social Behaviour. Mr Loosely is pleased to stand by the principle that the children of both Bond and Free settlers are equally welcome, for how else is the principle of Liberal Brotherhood and Social Cohesion to be imbued in a colony which will not Forever be based on the Labour of Assigned Slaves? Prospectuses available from the school, 27 Grafton Street, and from the offices of the Goulburn Vindicator.
It was precisely the sort of school Mr Finlay would go to great expense not to send his son to. I fetched young, compliant Felix from the cook. He certainly seemed to possess a great capacity to study and adapt to habits one might have thought were strange to him. For he sat up drinking tea from a cup like a little Englishman. Still wearing his blanket cape as well as a small pair of knee pants the cook had in decency found for him, he grimaced studiously as I led him away from her kindly presence. The cook clasped my hand, as convict cooks were not unknown in their Gaelic familiarity to do, and said with tears flowing, ‘Sir, if I might say to you be kindly. I had three wee creatures myself I must leave behind when I was shipped.’
A groom saddled Hobbes, and we mounted and were away. I found the Grafton Street address and left Felix standing beneath a tree outside the small colonial cottage. After knocking at the part-open front door, and getting no answer but the drone of a male voice from within, I entered to discover Mr Matthew Loosely instructing an assortment of some seven colonial children. Some bare-footed, they sat in the second of two upright pews, and attached to the back of the seat in front of them was a flap of wood which could be raised to make a desk of sorts. Mr Loosely’s children indeed appeared to be the children of pardoned convicts who lived in town, where some of them ran profitable businesses, including – as Mr Gonfleur had complained at one point last night – illicit stills in Goulburn’s skirtings of bush.
The instructor, a little brownish-complexioned man no older than thirty, was pointing to a map of the Roman Empire which hung from an easel, and introducing his charges to the mysteries of Rome’s First Servile War, taking a very sympathetic view of the slave general Eunus. ‘These slave men and women of Sicily were not distinguished from their masters in any way. So the resentment which immortal souls naturally harbour towards bondage sought merely a spark to ignite it. The spark was provided, children, by a tyrannous master named Damophilus, a landowner of Enna.’ He pointed to the map of Sicily as a red-headed cornstalk child reverently yawned. I could see that Mr Loosely blazed with a sort of banked energy, and I noticed in his pupils both a lack of timidity and a liveliness I could not help but approve of. He noticed me observing him from the door, and called, ‘Mrs Loosely. Please.’ Mrs Loosely, tall, pale and full in the body, entered from a door, and he handed her the pointing stick as indication she was in temporary command.
‘Sir, follow me,’ he said and led me out into the patch of garden in front of his house to converse.
‘Mr Loosely,’ I began, ‘I listened fascinated while eavesdropping at your door.’
‘Thank you, sir. We must remember that the history of the servile rebellions of Rome was written to glorify those who suppressed them. The offspring of former assigned convicts may need that critical knowledge to negotiate their way in this society, and see history written aright.’
I pointed out the waiting Felix.
Mr Loosely peered. ‘Is he black, or is he a mulatto?’
‘I do not absolutely know the answer to that question. But I think half-caste.’
‘Oh,’ he said in a particular way so that I realised he presumed the child was mine. ‘And his name?’
‘His name is … his name is Felix. I fou
nd him by his dead mother beyond the limits nearly two hundred miles from here. He is a promising little fellow who seems to be about four years of age, and I would be happy to pay for him to attend your academy should you find room for him amongst your boarders. I assume you have boarders?’
‘The two with shoes are boarders,’ he told me flatly. ‘In that regard, what the child is wearing now would not be satisfactory.’
‘I would fit him out fully,’ I told Mr Loosely, ‘or leave a sum with you out of which it could be done. And since I intend to live remotely, I could leave with you an amount which would see him set up for at least a year with you. Mr Finlay could vouch for me.’
‘The extreme Exclusivist!’ murmured Mr Loosely, with a rumour of a smile. ‘But I shall accept your good character if you will accept my MA.’
‘Is there any doubt about that?’ I asked with a half smile, though I had wondered.
‘I give you my word of honour that I am utterly equipped to turn the children of convicts into scholars and that even though men in far-off places, especially New South Wales, regularly and falsely claim home distinctions, such as college degrees from Oxford and her lesser sister Cambridge, my qualifications are utterly as stated. I would not blame you for doubting though.’
‘I envy you your capacity to look down on Cambridge,’ I told him. ‘I am afraid my Vandemonian father could not in the end afford to send me there.’ Not that I grieved in any way for that. Cambridge would have distracted me from my discovery of mainland Australia, restricting me perhaps to some Hobart law office. ‘But the question which has occurred to me,’ I continued, pressing close upon what I knew would raise passion in him, ‘is whether there might be any member of the sable brethren who is capable of achieving a baccalaureate. You have in this child, whom I will present to you, and of whose welfare I shall, despite my remote station, never be negligent, perhaps the chance for such a thing. You have the proof to all of Australia that there exists no inherent flaw in the native race. I have seen this child, and he has travelled with me, and I have observed him to have as much intellectual capacity as any convict child. His silences and reticence seem related more to the horrors he has seen than to any inherent intellectual inferiority.’