A Fringe of Leaves (10 page)

Enhanced by Austin’s sallow face and expression of anxiety, Garnet made a charming impression: his frock so cut as to reveal the shoulders, his lips as glossy as washed cherries, his chestnut hair arranged by an admiring nurse with a studied casualness which left the forehead engagingly exposed.

‘Though Providence has dealt me several blows,’ the old lady would maunder on, ‘I should not complain. Austin was spared, and Austin has been a comfort to me. Well, we shall all soon be dead. Not you, my dear, you are far too healthy.’ Here a soft white hand would fumble after a firmer one. ‘Garnet is as good as dead. What use is a boy to his mother, or anybody else, living down there in Van Dieman’s Land?’

Once Ellen had taken a deep enough breath to ask, ‘What decided Mr Garnet Roxburgh to emigrate to Van Diemen’s Land?’

The mother was so far caught off her guard that she launched herself immediately. ‘He didn’t decide—it was decided for him by Austin, Mr Daintrey, and several others who had his interests at heart. It was not his fault. He was headstrong and unwise, and fell amongst bad company.’ Here it must have occurred to the narrator that it might be imprudent to cast more light on an incident best consigned to obscurity, for she gasped, and sniffed, and dabbed a little before concluding, ‘They say there are compensations for living in Van Diemen’s Land—some very quaint marsupials. Garnet himself told me about them in a letter.’

Not long after, old Mrs Roxburgh died. Her son Austin was deeply affected by her death, as might have been foreseen, and all but his wife decided to avoid his company during the prolonged period of mourning. As for the old woman’s daughter (so Ellen considered herself and was considered by then) she wept as the earth was shovelled in unfeeling clods down upon the coffin. Her husband would have preferred her to restrain her grief, at least till later, because a red face smeared with tears reminded him in public of the farmer’s daughter he had married, when he had begun to congratulate himself on her being buried deeper than his mother. (Stricken by his private sentiments, Mr Roxburgh wrote off to London, ordering a dozen pair of gloves of the size he had noted at the back of his journal the year he married ‘Ellen Gluyas’.)

Persuaded to rest awhile in her husband’s bunk Mrs Roxburgh regretted her lethargy. Within the motion of the heaving ship and the rustle of the straw-filled palliasse she remained a core of inertia. She yawned uncontrollably. Oh for her down pillows and feather-bed at Cheltenham! Wishes did not prevent her ploughing her cheek deeper into the coarse slip upon which it was resting and where her husband’s cheek lingered: around her there was still the scent of sleep; she was pervaded and soothed by it. Soon, she promised herself, she would make up the beds, like any under-housemaid, but until then, she resigned herself to the undulations of her feathered thoughts. If she shuddered once or twice, and chafed the gooseflesh out of her arms, it was because she knew she would be led deeper than she would have chosen, and inevitably trapped in what she most loathed.

‘
Why?
’ he pondered in high anguish.

They were seated on deck in a warm corner on the lee side of the barque
Kestrel
. If the breeze held, they were but a day out of Hobart Town.

The warmth, the prospect, must have gulled Mr Roxburgh into meeting his wife’s disagreeable question with an uncharacteristically direct reply. ‘My brother was accused of forging a signature. Oh, nothing was
proved
! The accusation was based on suspicion rather than evidence, and knowing my brother I am confident that he was not guilty.’ Mr Roxburgh thrust his hands back to back between his bony knees; sunken cheeks and clenched jaws contributed to the impression that he had suddenly aged. ‘Poor Garnet, he was never bad! Rash, admittedly, and too personable. He had the fatal gift of attracting almost everyone he met. The wrong people led him astray.’

‘When the wrong people led him astray, surely it was your brother who must have felt attracted?’ For her husband’s sake she would not have liked to think it.

Practically shouting, Mr Roxburgh repeated in his brother’s defence, ‘He is not
bad
! It was never
proved
!’

Presently they gathered up their books, their rugs, and went below, where Mrs Roxburgh occupied herself writing in her journal until it should be dinner-time.

… asked the imprudent question and received the painful answer. Mr R. most distressed. But I had to know. If I cld only rid myself of my dislike for Garnet R. so as not to go against my husband. But I continue seeing the little boy with glossy lips, and shallow eyes determined to dazzle as he stares out of the likeness his mother loved to show visitors. I can imagine the ‘personable’ man grown out of this little boy—the mocking lips, the blue eyes hardened by conceit and—I shld not allow myself to write it
—unproved dishonesty
. I believe I have always detested Garnet R. for outshining his brother. I must not allow myself to think such thoughts when it wld pain my dearest husband, only that I must protect him from his innocent faith in one who I am sure was never worthy of it …

By the time they went in to dinner Mrs Roxburgh was entrenched in her own virtuous resolves, and wore a glow to which her husband could not but respond admiringly.

Berthed alongside the quay at Hobart Town the following morning, a shrouded mountain looming over all, Ellen Roxburgh was less confident of her armoury. She remembered she was the farmer’s daughter who had married an honourable gentleman, and corrected her speech, and learned to obey certain accepted moral precepts and social rules, most of them as incongruous to her nature as her counterfeit of the Italian hand and her comments on the books with which her husband wished her to persevere. But her meeting with that husband’s adored brother, a second gentleman whose doubtful honour led her to expect a subtler version of the first, could prove the severest trial of those to which she had so far been subjected.

In the circumstances, Mrs Roxburgh lingered below settling her very modest bonnet (an old one, as Mr Roxburgh had requested for their voyage), patting the carpet-bag into shape, locking her leather dressing-case (in which she also kept her journal), while Austin Roxburgh went on deck to take part in the joyful, if also unnerving, reunion with his sibling.

When she could no longer defer the moment of joining them, her confusion at first prevented her assessing ‘Garnet R.’ with any clearness. She was aware only of the blaze from blue sceptical eyes, an intensification of the milder, shallower stare of the child in the miniature, and a hand uncommonly hard, like that of some mechanic, or farmer. By contrast his clothes, without being ostentatious, suggested expense, even fashion. The shirt-cuff was of impeccable linen, as he stooped to retrieve a leather glove he had let fall on the deck.

Withdrawing her glance from the wrist, she listened to the unnaturally high-pitched inanities in which long separation had forced the brothers to engage each other. After the initial compliments and inquiries on Garnet Roxburgh’s part, the two gentlemen mercifully ignored her.

‘… Are you
well
, Austin? You
look
well, you old, creaking gate!’

‘Inactivity, or the long sea voyage, has put new life in me, dear fellow. Though naturally I must always take care. My heart, as you know, is not of the best.’

Mr Garnet Roxburgh smiled absently, if it was not incredulously, at the idea that someone might suffer from a heart.

‘And you, Mrs Roxburgh—Ellen, isn’t it? if you’ll allow me—have you no ailments—or at any rate, complaints?’ he inquired as he propelled her the short distance along the gang-board on to the quay.

‘None,’ she answered while he was still at her back, ‘unless the nervous fidgets I developed from not arriving sooner.’ She was glad to hear grit beneath the soles of her boots, which not only meant she was once more standing on solid land but her first abrasive contact with it might have disintegrated a reply which could have sounded insipid, insincere, or worse to her husband’s ears—indiscreet.

But the brothers were too busy organizing and explaining to pay attention to shades of meaning.

‘The baggage will follow by bullock-wagon,’ their host told them. ‘That is, all but your immediate necessities. Those, we can take with us in the buggy.’

Except that mud had collected on the wheels and spattered the bodywork, the vehicle wore a gloss of paint which disguised bluntness of form in an elegance matching that of the owner himself.

During the longueurs of the voyage out Mr Roxburgh had informed his wife, ‘There is no actual reason for pitying Garnet, though our mother, understandably, always lamented losing her favourite son—yes, let us be realistic—to a hard and
morally infected
country like Van Diemen’s Land. In fact Garnet has done very well for himself. By marrying a considerably older widow of means, his position in the community became assured. If the woman died not long after, in a regrettable accident, at least he inherited her property, from which, I gather, he has a respectable income.’

‘How did Mrs Garnet Roxburgh die?’

‘In the accident,’ Austin replied, but vaguely, for his mind was occupied with other thoughts.

Driven by the widower through Hobart Town, Ellen returned, if only by an imagined glimpse, to the accident in which Mrs Garnet Roxburgh died.

‘Do you approve?’ she realized her brother-in-law was asking.

‘Of what?’

‘Of our neat little town.’

‘It is that,’ she said. ‘And English. I have difficulty in believing I am being driven through a famous penal colony of the antipodes.’

He laughed. ‘You will soon believe, but need not fear, or feel embarrassed if, like Austin, you are given to embarrassment. The authorities keep the wretches suitably employed, and on the whole, subdued.’

Overhearing himself accused, Austin began to protest that he never experienced embarrassment—well, almost never—and the two brothers were soon engaged in banter and laughter and reminiscence.

Excluded from this, Mrs Roxburgh was able to enjoy her view of the unassuming, while often charming houses, their general effect of modest substance sometimes spoilt by the intrusion of an over-opulent façade. Hens were allowed the freedom of the streets, and an ambling cow almost grazed a wheel of the buggy with her ribs. The scent of the cow’s breath, the thudding of her hooves, and the plop of falling dung, filled Ellen with an immeasurable homesickness. Had it not been for the uncommunicative stares of respectable burgesses and the open scowls of those who must be their slaves, she might have been driving Gluyas’s cart to market.

When they had left the town and were headed for the interior, the two brothers fell silent. Austin had exhausted himself by a detailed description of the monument in the classic style he had personally designed for erection over their mother’s grave. Garnet sighed; a gloom descended on him, less from melancholy regrets than from boredom, Ellen felt; or perhaps it was the prospect of a long visit by members of his family.

In any case he seemed to have grown oblivious of a sister-in-law he had shown no signs of taking seriously. Not that she would have welcomed his serious attentions. She thought she would dislike him even more than she had anticipated. He had about him something which she, the farmer’s daughter and spurious lady, recognized as coarse and sensual. Perhaps this was what she resented, and that a Roxburgh should both embody and remind her of it. As he held the reins in his hands during what had become this monotonous drive, she noticed his thick wrists and the hairs visible on them in the space between glove and cuff. She turned away her head. She more than disliked, she was repelled, not only by the man, but by her own thoughts, which her husband and her late mother-in-law would not have suspected her of harbouring.

To escape from her inner self she looked out across the country, when her attention was caught by a party of men who could only have been some of the ‘wretches’ to whom Garnet Roxburgh had referred. The prisoners were divided into two squads, each engaged in pushing a hand-cart loaded with freshly quarried stone. Armed guards were shouting orders, unintelligible at that distance. The party had but recently emerged from a dip between two slopes. From dragging their carts to the crest of the second, the men were now proceeding to brake, those in front by digging their heels into the hillside, their bodies inclined back against the carts, those behind straining with their whole weight to resist a too-rapid descent. Every face was raised to the sun, teeth bared in sobbing mouths when the lips were not tightly clenched, skin streaming with light and sweat. In contrast to the tanned cheeks and furiously mobile faces, the closed eyes and white eyelids gave the prisoners that expression of unnatural serenity seen in the blind, and which makes them appear all but removed from the life around them.

Mrs Roxburgh was immediately glad of the lowered eyelids, and that the men most probably would not catch sight of her before the buggy rounded a shoulder of the hill ahead. She felt a pang of commiseration through the hardships and indignities suffered during girlhood, but was more intent on avoiding the prisoners’ undoubted resentment of the physical ease and peace of mind they must imagine if they were to open their eyes.

So she clenched her gloved hands, and willed the horses to increase their speed. From brooding, and from biting on her lips, these felt thick and sullen. At least her companions had started a desultory conversation and were too engrossed in the past to notice the work-party of convicts before those unfortunate human beasts were lost to sight.

The landscape through which the travellers were driving was by turns cultivated and wild. An occasional stone cottage or hut built of wattle-and-daub looked the meaner for the tiered forests towering above them. The roads were consistently execrable. The two stout horses lumbered onward, darkened with sweat except where a lather had broken out from the friction of crupper and trace against their coats. Ruts frequently threw the passengers together with a violence which seemed almost personal in its intent.