‘When I proposed this little expedition to Bristol Maid, to speed the Roxburghs on their way, I didn’t expect we should be plunged in gloom,’ Mr Merivale remarked, his own good humour protecting him from becoming more than superficially involved.
‘How you misunderstand, Stafford!’ his wife protested and frowned.
It was her favourite expression for use upon her husband, although if asked to elaborate, her own understanding might not have stood the strain.
As for Miss Scrimshaw, she fell to contemplating her lap, and answered with recovered meekness, ‘Almost everybody, I imagine, is subject to their fits of gloom.’
She was dressed entirely in brown, with an aureole of brown moiré roses parcelled into the scuttle of her bonnet. It made her complexion, if not livery, browner than it should have been.
Mrs Merivale thought she recognized, below the hem of her friend’s mantle, a skirt she herself had discarded, and was at once rewarded by this glimpse of her own generosity.
‘Miss Scrimshaw, like myself, probably felt most deeply for those poor souls in their wretched little tub, and all the miles of tedium and danger between them and what they love.’ Mrs Merivale in her enclosed and comfortable carriage allowed herself the luxury of pity. ‘Much as I dislike my present surroundings I would not undertake the voyage home except in some fast-sailing barque equipped to accommodate passengers. I cannot endure discomfort, as you know.’
She might have been accusing her husband, but was in fact frowning through the window at a carter who, in the effort to turn, had jammed his dray across the street, threatening to bar their passage.
Mr Merivale cleared his throat. ‘Bristol Maid reached Hobart Town in passable time — I have it from Captain Purdew — and without undue incident. With the same good seamanship, there is no reason to believe she’ll come to grief on the return voyage.’
Nobody spoke at first.
Then Mrs Merivale reiterated, ‘Had it been myself, I should have waited for a passage in some fast-sailing barque.’ Her head swayed tragically, not so much for the fate of her new-found acquaintances as for the tactics of the offending carter struggling to manœuvre his dray.
‘It must have been the brother,’ Miss Scrimshaw decided. ‘It is embarrassing — as I know — to depend indefinitely on the good will of a blood relation.’
Mr Merivale laughed. ‘Austin Roxburgh and his brother Garnet have always been devoted to each other. That is why Austin, in spite of failing health, decided to make the voyage out to Van Diemen’s Land — to enjoy the pleasure of seeing his brother — I don’t like to say it, but must be candid — for what could be the last time.’
‘With such an affection for his brother it is all the more extraordinary that an ailing man should hasten to sail in a brig the size of Bristol Maid.’ Miss Scrimshaw was ferreting after something. ‘Perhaps,’ she hesitated, ‘it was Mrs Roxburgh who made the decision.’
It was enough for Mrs Merivale to lose interest in the carter and his dray. ‘Why ever now should Mrs Roxburgh?’ She looked to Miss Scrimshaw for some revelation of a stunning nature.
‘Mrs Roxburgh may not have been so affectionately disposed towards her husband’s brother.’ Miss Scrimshaw’s voice slurred, and she blushed for what was more sibylline inspiration than solidly founded reasoning.
Mrs Merivale rounded on her. ‘There was no hint today that Mrs Roxburgh and her brother-in-law had fallen out.’
‘That may be,’ Miss Scrimshaw confessed, staring, and not, into the street. ‘No,’ she ejaculated, as though about to disparage her own instinct. ‘Nor do I wish to cast aspersions of any kind on any of your acquaintances. You must realize, Mr Merivale, it was a mere theory, regrettably flimsy, which formed itself in the course of conversation.’
Mrs Merivale was all admiration for her friend’s agility in extricating herself from possible blame; her own lips moved like those of a ventriloquist in time with his knowing doll’s pronouncement.
While Mr Merivale might have withdrawn behind a curtain of the past: when he spoke, his speech had slowed. ‘I can’t say I was close to Austin. His wife I never met until today. The brother, Garnet, was my friend.’
For a moment it seemed as though this honourable and uncomplicated man had grown disgruntled too, for the way fate had dealt with him. If his mouth had tightened, his ordinarily gaunt, erect head lolled softly on his shoulders, the eyes half-closed on a deeper than antipodean shade, his memory apparently dwelling on images more convincing than any the present had to offer. Each of the ladies was conscious of a change of climate, although neither received the same sting of wet oak-leaves on parted lips.
‘Garnet and I rode together over half Hampshire when we were boys,’ Stafford Merivale recollected. ‘First, on shaggy ponies. Later to hounds. Often when we were grown, we would hack just for the fun of it, over the downs, and along the Roman road. I can remember Garnet putting his horse at a hedge as wide as a hay-wain, somewhere this side of Stockbridge. One moment, there he was, beside me on the sunken road. The next, I heard him laughing the other side of a thorn wall.’
‘And you?’ Miss Scrimshaw inquired. ‘Did you follow him?’
‘I was always a plodder,’ Mr Merivale replied.
Nor was the spinster’s respect diminished.
‘Austin now, was of another temperament — a different strain, one might say,’ the surveyor continued. ‘Always had his nose in a book. I scarcely saw him, excepting when he would come outside, poking about in the garden. Not working at it. He was delicate, you see. At one stage he was thought to be sick of a consumption. Then, his heart was bad. And the strange part was, it seemed to draw him closer to his very unlikely brother. As though he hoped to borrow some of Garnet’s health and strength. I think I was jealous of Austin.’ Stafford Merivale smiled, and paused. ‘He studied law. But did not practise. His health would not have permitted. And married this devoted young woman we have just met.’
‘Mrs Austin Roxburgh,’ Miss Scrimshaw gravely asked, ‘was she also Hampshire born?’
‘I never heard of her’, Mr Merivale replied, ‘anywhere round Winchester.’
‘I understood Mrs Roxburgh to be from Cornwall.’ Mrs Merivale never missed reminding her husband of anything he happened to forget.
‘A remote county!’ Miss Scrimshaw was perhaps reinforcing her ‘theory’. ‘Of dark people. I cannot remember ever having been on intimate terms with any individual of Cornish blood. All my own family’, she added, ‘were fair. Both brothers and sisters. Especially the daughters of cousins. With faint tea-rose complexions. I was the only brown one.’
Mrs Merivale might have felt chilled had she not realized at once that Miss Scrimshaw’s mind had strayed to her Connection, the tilted lady of Saffron Walden. In the circumstances, Mrs Merivale warmed to poor Miss Scrimshaw, youngest of a clergyman’s protracted family. None had heard tell how she had reached New South Wales, nor taken her deep enough into their hearts to call her by her first name. (Whether out of wariness or cruelty her parents had in fact christened their tenth Decima.)
Miss Scrimshaw, her inward eye fixed on fair estates, might have elaborated on the darker side of Cornwall had not Mr Merivale chosen the moment to propound something most unexpected.
He sat forward, hands clasped between his knees, the better to accuse, it would have seemed. ‘I don’t believe you ladies formed a high opinion of the Roxburghs.’