The Dark Mountain Page 2

  It seems to me now, looking back, that his noble influence could be felt even after his death. Or was I too young to retain any ominous impressions? I was six years old when my father died. Between that date and the incident at Belanglo, I experienced nothing that left me with any lasting sense of dismay. I saw pigs feasting on wheat stubble. I picked peaches and chased hens. I scolded my sister Emily for playing near the creek, and overturned one of the pans in the dairy. Not once was I beaten. Not once did I run away and conceal myself.

  Yet the storm clouds must have been gathering long before that fateful day in 1836. For George Barton was among us—and John Lynch, too. It seems incredible now, but they have left no mark on my early recollections, though I know that they were about. My mother told me so. She told me that my father had hired Barton as overseer; that she herself was not responsible. And she told me of an event which occurred not one week after my father’s death, when John Lynch disobeyed a direct order.

  ‘His character was always bad,’ she announced, as much to distract me as anything else. (This must have been in Sydney, for she was poring over a newspaper article about Lynch’s execution for mass murder.) ‘Had we only known then what we know today!’ she said. ‘But I never liked him. He was lazy and insolent. Even at that time, before he committed his most heinous acts, his disposition struck me as being utterly flawed. He refused to yoke the bullocks. When instructed to take a dray out to Bargo Brush, he refused to yoke the last two bullocks—I don’t know why.’

  For his refusal, John Lynch received a sentence of fifty lashes from the magistrates’ bench. This, at least, was my mother’s story, and I have no reason to disbelieve it. I must admit, though, that it does give me pause. Perhaps my father did not extend his influence from beyond the grave. Had he done so, I doubt that John Lynch would have been brought before the local magistrates. Very few of the convicts under my father’s protection ever were; his strength of character was such that, on those rare occasions when his assigned men did misbehave, he dealt with them in his own fashion, firmly but fairly, and never in contradiction of the laws of the land.

  If more settlers had been like Papa, this country would have had a much happier birth.

  Needless to say, I saw nothing of John Lynch’s punishment. I was blind to any discontent among the huts that stood behind our great house. If the assigned men were disrespectful or if they suffered any unfair usage at the hands of their overseer, I did not witness it. Like any young child, I saw only what lay directly in front of me: the plum pudding dispensed at Christmas; my cambric muslin frock; the candle moulds; the grindstone; the smooth, alluring handrail on Oldbury’s staircase, which curled at the end like the spiral shell of a triton. My interests were narrow but keen. I loved my mother’s sketchbook and her camel-hair paint-brushes. I enjoyed mounting a stick, and racing against Emily when she was similarly mounted. I adored the skittish young kangaroo who came to be fed every evening near the stockyard. Upon waking, I would throw off my covers, eager to greet the day.

  On this particular day—January the thirtieth, 1836—I rose early, roused by the clatter of buckets and the warbling of magpies. At the time, Oldbury’s nursery was positioned directly over the front portico, facing south-west; therefore no pearly fingers of sunlight were creeping through the window shutters. I did not share my bed, then, for Emily had her own (as did James), and Louisa, though nearly two, still slept beside my mother, who was concerned about her health. Louisa was a sickly child, who grew into a frail adult. I don’t believe that Mama ever ceased to fret over her, from the very moment of her birth. Indeed, there are children who seem to enter this world reluctantly, and whose grasp of life remains weak for as long as they might live. Louisa was one such child.

  The same could not be said for the rest of us, however. We were all sturdy enough. Being raised on a farm must have constituted some advantage, in this regard; we were not so exposed to the epidemics that swept through Sydney, and our food was almost always fresh. Furthermore, our supply of water was very good. From the window of the nursery I could look out across the gently sloping front garden—over its picket gate and incipient hawthorn hedge—towards the creek, which never ran dry. Not ever. Even during the great drought of 1839, the creek at Oldbury continued to flow. No doubt this is why my father chose the spot, for in other respects Oldbury could, perhaps, have been better situated. It was so very crammed up against the foot of Gingenbullen that one felt perpetually encroached upon—since Gingenbullen, though hardly more than a hill (and a flat-topped hill, at that) still possessed a powerfully solid presence. It was impossible to ignore. Cloaked in dark, dull foliage, and crowned with certain mounds or tumuli left by ancient native tribes, it was altogether too close for comfort.

  So was the creek. During heavy rains, the low ground could get very boggy. As a child this did not concern me—in fact I delighted in mud at that age—but now I wonder if it was entirely healthy, living pinched between a steep rise and a sodden morass. Not that anything was sodden on that day in January. It had been dry for some weeks. Pulling open a shutter, I found myself peering out at a parched and dusty scene. Even in the softening light of sunrise, the grass in the pastures beyond our front garden was leached of colour, pale and crisp. The sky to the west was cloudless.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Emily whispered. She had swept aside her white bed-curtains, and was struggling to disentangle herself from her twisted sheets. (Emily always slept as if being tossed on a griddle.) ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Shh!’ I closed the shutter. ‘You’ll wake James!’

  ‘Is it time for breakfast?’

  ‘Shhh!’

  I had already learned to dress myself, for with three younger siblings, I had been given little choice in the matter. Emily was not so well trained. She needed help with her buttons and her shoes—help that I gave her, though grudgingly. Only her hair was beyond my skill. We both wore our hair in rags when we went to bed, Emily because her hair was dead straight, and myself because my hair was inclined to frizz unless carefully tended. Looking at the crop of blue cotton sausages that dangled from my sister’s head, I felt as helpless as a landsman confronted by a tangle of ship’s rigging.

  ‘We’ll brush our hair later,’ I hissed, and crept out of the nursery onto the landing. To my surprise, I saw that Mama’s bedroom door was standing slightly ajar, and I wondered if Louisa had been sick during the night. But my train of thought was suddenly interrupted, for Emily had slipped past me and gained the stairs; she had taken the lead in a way that I found unacceptable. Who was the elder of us, after all?

  ‘Wait!’ I commanded. ‘Wait for me!’

  She obeyed at once, as was her nature. At that age Emily was highly biddable, and I do not believe that she changed very greatly over time. Of the four of us, she was the most easily led, and remained so until her death. She was also the fairest. At six, her hair was still light—far lighter than mine. I have always resembled my mother, having inherited her dark hair and eyes. The others, to varying degrees, were more our father’s children.

  ‘I’m very hungry,’ Emily murmured, as I took the lead. ‘Do you think Robert will give us some milk?’

  ‘Not if Mama is awake,’ was my reply.

  ‘Is Mama awake?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Together we padded downstairs to the hall, and from there into the dining room, which was still handsomely furnished. (The sideboard, the carpet, the silver candlesticks—all were later sold.) Standing just inside the door, we could see into the adjoining breakfast room, where Jane was arranging cutlery. In 1836 there were five domestic servants at Oldbury, all but two of them assigned; Jane was one of the free servants. She was very young— about fourteen, I should think—and not well trained, placing each fork so carefully and nervously onto the cloth that she might have been laying out a corpse.

  I could hear my mother’s voice from the kitchen.

  ‘Mama!’ exclaimed Emily, rushing forward. I followed at a more sedat
e pace. The kitchen occupied a separate stone building, close to the breakfast room and directly accessible from the back veranda. The dairy, an identical structure, stood opposite the kitchen like a mirror image. There were bread ovens in the kitchen, and larders leading off it, all of them locked. The curing of ham and bacon was accomplished further from the house, as was the laundry. In an establishment the size of Oldbury, one is not forced to hang wet clothes over sugar bags, or store soap and tallow beside dressed meat. There is a proper place for everything, and nothing goes to waste.

  ‘You must take all you want now, for I will not be here to unlock the larders,’ my mother was saying. ‘Do you hear me, Bridget?’

  ‘Yes, Mam.’

  ‘Think very carefully about what you might need. You will need jam for the pudding. You will need salt for the meat. I do not want to hear complaints about insipid dishes, because you have not had the forethought to plan for dinner.’

  ‘No, Mam,’ Bridget replied. Though I doubt that she understood the meaning of ‘insipid’, she could not misread my mother’s tone. I should point out that my mother’s patience had been sorely tried, over the years, by the measures that had to be taken on the Oldbury estate to protect our supplies of food and drink. Stolen linen cannot easily be concealed; stolen food, on the other hand, always disappears quickly. Tea and coffee, sugar and treacle, rice and brandy, cocoa and arrowroot—all of it had to be secured behind locked doors, or chained to the wall in barrels, or kept under my mother’s watchful eye. She was heartily sick of being summoned to the kitchen, at regular intervals throughout the day, because our cook needed currants, or almonds, or something else of great importance that had been forgotten the last time my mother unlocked the storerooms. One might ask: ‘Why not, in that case, simply find another cook?’ But competent servants of good character were not readily available at that time, in that part of the world. Though Bridget might have been dull-witted in some respects, she was honest, loyal, sober, and reasonably clean. I was never informed of the crime for which she had been transported, but she had received her ticket-of-leave while my father was alive.

  Jane, the young housemaid, was her daughter.

  ‘I shall also need some light provisions,’ my mother continued. ‘The rest of the salt beef, wrapped in a cloth; the usual tea and sugar; perhaps a little dried fruit.’

  ‘There’s tart, Mam. From yesterday.’

  ‘Leave the tart for the children. I’ll tell Eliza.’

  ‘Where are you going, Mama?’ I felt impelled to speak, for I did not like it when my mother left us. ‘Are you going to Sutton Forest? May we come too?’

  My mother turned. She was all of forty in 1836, but did not look it; her hair was still raven, her figure still neat, her constitution still vigorous. Though small in stature, and clad for the most part in widow’s weeds, she managed to present a forceful appearance.

  That morning, I noticed, she was dressed in her old riding habit.

  ‘Charlotte,’ she said. ‘Where is your brother?’

  ‘Asleep.’

  ‘You should be asleep.’

  ‘Where are you going, Mama? Are you going to church?’

  ‘I am going to Belanglo,’ she replied. ‘With Mr Barton.’

  ‘May we come too?’

  ‘No, you may not.’ Looking down at Emily, who was clutching at her skirts, my mother said: ‘You must brush out your hair, both of you. I don’t want you running around in such a state.’

  ‘I am very hungry, Mama,’ Emily declared, and my mother lifted an eyebrow.

  ‘In that case you should brush out your hair at once,’ she said, ‘because you cannot recite your morning prayers looking like a sea-urchin—and you cannot reasonably expect breakfast until you have said your morning prayers!’

  ‘But Mama—’ I began.

  ‘Ask Eliza to help you,’ my mother interrupted, and turned back to address Bridget.

  So we were forced to retrace our steps, Emily and I: across the back veranda, past Jane in the breakfast room, through the dining room and up the stairs. Here we met my brother coming down, for he had recently awakened. He had also made a feeble attempt to dress himself, but being only four, he had not achieved the kind of results likely to satisfy Mama. He had simply pulled his little breeches on over his nightshirt.

  ‘James!’ I said. ‘You can’t come down like that.’

  ‘Where’s Eliza?’ he lisped.

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps with the baby.’

  Eliza was our nurse—the latest in a series of nurses whose failings were a constant trial to my mother. Thanks to the colony’s acute lack of respectable female domestic staff, my mother had been forced to lower her very high standards with regards to the care of her children. No sooner did she find an acceptable freed or freeborn nurse than this paragon was certain to be carried off by some local farmer or shopkeeper in need of a wife. Alternatively, when driven to choose from a selection of assigned convicts, my poor mother had to cope with secret drinkers, savage tempers, slow wits or careless dispositions. A bright and merry girl might prove to have a fatal weakness for male company; a stolid and reliable one might be absolutely impossible to wake at night. Eliza, for her part, was rather timid, and almost incapable of exacting obedience from a strong-willed child. On the other hand, she was quiet, neat, patient, and extremely good with babies.

  She doted on Louisa, beside whose crib we found her sitting, with a small, embroidered cap in her hand and my sister perched on her knee.

  ‘Look!’ she said, when she saw us standing on the threshold. ‘Where’s Charlotte? Where is your sister?’

  ‘Charla!’ Louisa crowed, pointing one pudgy finger at me. But I ignored it.

  ‘Mama says, will you help us to brush our hair?’ I said to Eliza. ‘And James needs dressing.’

  ‘Aye,’ our nurse answered softly. ‘I’ll do that.’

  I am not sure why Eliza was transported to this country. No doubt her crime was some minor theft, for my mother would have been loath to employ a prostitute. All I knew about Eliza was what she had let fall herself: she spoke often of her younger sisters and brothers, who had frequently been left in her charge when she was ‘no older than Miss Charlotte’. Perhaps her dreamy and placid disposition stemmed from a nostalgic tendency, together with a firm refusal to dwell on more recent events in her life. At any rate, she never referred to her ‘lagging’, or to anything associated with it.

  Possibly she had received firm instructions from my mother on the subject, and had not the courage to defy them.

  She was a pleasant-looking girl, with a weak chin, a rather high colour, and nimble fingers. Her plain and fancy work were equally good; my mother often gave her lace to mend, and our daintier garments to repair. She therefore made quick work of my hair rags, and of James’s innumerable buttons. But she was constitutionally incapable of persuading him to stop throwing his marbles at the wall. When she tried, he simply bade her to ‘return to her work’—in exactly my mother’s tone and manner.

  I was the one who had to make him mind: who wrested the marbles from him, told him that he was as stupid as a goose, and warned him that I would tell Mama. Then I propelled him from the nursery, and together we proceeded back down to the breakfast room, with Emily following close behind.

  My mother was waiting.

  ‘Much better,’ she declared, upon examining us. ‘I saw a pair of rough-headed savages in the kitchen earlier, but now my dearest daughters are returned to me.’ And she led us all through our prayers, taking particular care with James, who still found them a struggle. Though he could recite the Lord’s Prayer, the Morning Hymn was quite beyond his powers.

  After prayers, Mama gave us our bread, butter and tea, telling us that we had to be good while she was gone, and urging us to mind Eliza—who by this time had joined us. ‘I shall set you each a task that must be completed before I return tomorrow,’ Mama said. ‘James, you are to find me three native leaves, each of a different shape, and sketch them
in your book. Emily, you have still to finish your reading. Charlotte, you are to write me a short essay on the manufacture of a batter pudding, from the ploughing of the sod to the consuming of the finished product. This afternoon,’ she added, ‘I want you all to find at least two new specimens for our seed pod collection.’

  My mother, I should explain, was a tireless and indefatigable teacher. She had always undertaken to educate every one of her children without the aid of either school or governess; she taught drawing, writing and botany particularly well. Of late, however, her time had been very much given to the management of Oldbury. Her duties as a mother had been progressively overtaken by her duties as a landholder.

  I had noticed this change, and resented it.

  ‘Could I not come with you, Mama?’ was my plaintive request. ‘After all, I’m a big girl, now.’

  ‘You are,’ my mother agreed, retrieving Louisa’s spoon from the floor. ‘Which is precisely why you must stay here, and take care of the others. It is your duty, Charlotte—your duty as the eldest. Could she be teething, do you think?’ (This to Eliza.) ‘Her gums seem rather red.’

  ‘Aye, Mam. They do.’

  ‘Poor poppet.’ Mama laid the backs of two fingers against Louisa’s pale cheek. ‘You must wash her mouth out with rosewater, and if that fails, I shall boil up some poppy heads. Yes, James, what is it?’

  ‘I’m finished.’

  ‘Are you, indeed? Then what do you have to say for yourself?’

  ‘Uh . . .’ He screwed up his face in thought. ‘Thank God for my good breakfast!’ he finally exclaimed.

  ‘Well done. Down you get.’

  ‘And me, Mama?’

  ‘You too, Emily. Only don’t go far, if you please.’

  I would have stayed, given the chance. But I was sent off to watch the others until it was time to say goodbye. By then the sun was up, though the shadows were still long. James retrieved his little wheelbarrow, and occupied himself with transporting stones from one pile to another, while Emily begged some new milk from our dairyman, Robert. At last two saddled horses were brought around to the back veranda, and they proved to be a magnet for every child within hailing distance. I begged a carrot from Bridget, and was given a handful of oats instead; the oats were carefully apportioned; the horses, Angel and Toby, were fed and stroked, under the single eye of Henry the ostler, as various cloth-wrapped bundles were loaded into saddlebags.