However she held herself Mrs Roxburgh could not avoid unpleasant contact with her brother-in-law’s nearside shoulder; when suddenly he turned to her. ‘We shall arrive, God willing, for dinner. By which time’, he added, laughing, ‘we should be fairly well acquainted with each other, whether we like it or not.’ It was practically as though her husband his brother had not been there.
If she did not reply in words, she could not very well withhold the semblance of a smile from one in whose glance she recognized the provocative candour of the boy in the miniature. Not to have smiled would have made her appear sour, she thought, or offended by neglect.
Soon afterwards a drizzle started blowing in their faces. Her husband coughed and felt his coat. It was cold for the time of year. Trees in cottage gardens were heavy with unripened fruit.
Garnet Roxburgh apologized that their vehicle lacked a hood. ‘Does the rain inconvenience you?’ he asked her, instead of his obviously fretting brother.
‘Not at all,’ she replied. ‘I am used to it.’
Again, in memory, she was Ellen Gluyas driving her cart to market at Penzance. Had they noticed her smile the Roxburghs might have found irony there.
But they remained unaware, and she was moved to take her husband’s hand. She squeezed it and he looked surprised, wondering at the reason for her gesture.
They toiled on. The drizzle was blown past and behind them. Above an uneven crop of oats, through a gap in darkling trees, hung the faintest smudge of rainbow. She could feel her cheeks glowing, not only from the chill, but from the veiled surprises the country had to offer at every turn. Nor would she let a brother-in-law she must continue to dislike detract from her enjoyment.
‘Here we are,’ Mr Garnet Roxburgh was able at last to announce, ‘at “Dulcet”—if not for dinner, then not long after.’
The horses were heading for feed and water down a lane to one side, but he pulled on their mouths and brought them to a stand-still beside a white-painted wicket-gate set in a hedge and guarded by two cypresses. The hedge was of thickset clipped box; the cypresses had been trimmed too, as well as decapitated, which gave the precincts a military, if not a penal air. Faced with such rigid discipline almost any new arrival must have been deterred from judging the house itself at first glance, though it seemed pleasing enough, built for comfort rather than for show, even if drastically improved by those who had ‘succeeded’ in it. The general impression was of a low, widespreading structure behind a shallow veranda, the body of the house extended to considerable depth through subsidiary rooms and offices. Windows let into a shingle roof betrayed a cramped upper storey, probably for the use of servants.
Mrs Roxburgh felt she might have grown to love ‘Dulcet’, had fate planted her in it and her brother-in-law not been there.
Or perhaps she was being unjust. Perhaps he had a genuine love for the place, if for nothing and no one else; to have had them trim the hedge and the cypresses with such precision, and to have called for the painting of the wicket and the woodwork in general. For that matter, he may have loved the widow he married, who died in the unexplained accident.
‘Aren’t we coming down?’ he was shouting to passengers deaf or numbed.
The light glinted on his teeth; his arms were open to receive his sister-in-law.
But Mrs Roxburgh waited for her husband to descend and turn in her direction, after which she accepted a hand she would have chafed, had she been given a less public opportunity.
Barking dogs were silenced by their interest as they started smelling her skirt between gulps of disapproval; while two men with disenchanted Irish faces and amorphous garments fumbled for the baggage stowed in the tray beneath the buggy seat.
On the veranda steps two women of nicer appearance than the pair of rustics attending to the luggage waited to greet the visitors.
‘This is my housekeeper — Mrs Brennan,’ Mr Garnet indicated the older of the women in a would-be jovial, though offhand manner.
In her middle age, the housekeeper seemingly suffered from nerves. Her lips trembled halfway towards a smile when guided by Mrs Roxburgh’s example. The hair straggling from beneath a clean, though somewhat crushed cap, added to her air of distraction. Mrs Roxburgh had but a blurred impression of Mrs Brennan, much as though catching sight of the moon through tatters of grey-white, wind-wracked cloud.
‘And Holly, her helper.’ Garnet Roxburgh grew ever more offhand in his introductions.
While Mrs Brennan might have been handsome in her youth, the young girl was emphatically pretty at the present day, and in spite of a shapeless, grey dress and slovenly cap. Probably bold by nature, she was now intimidated almost to the point of tears by the arrival of strangers, perhaps also by her master’s brusqueness, as well as the hubbub of dogs barking and wheels grating as the horses strained to be gone to their provender, the Irish cursing them to hold hard.
The visitors would have retired willingly to their own quarters and given way to their exhaustion, had it not been required of them to listen, admire, recount, and feast until well into the evening. They excused themselves from supper. At last they might have comforted each other, but Mr Roxburgh became convinced that the sheets on their great bed were damp. It was only the cold, she tried to persuade him. Damp was damp, he insisted; his sense of touch never deceived him. After wrapping himself in his coat and a couple of travelling rugs he announced that he would spend the night on the sofa. It was beyond her powers to reassure or comfort him, nor could she feel comforted herself, lying alone between the suspect sheets.
Not until morning was Mrs Roxburgh able to review her first impressions in tranquillity and what she believed to be detachment, and to record some of them in her journal after a late breakfast in their room. Settling herself in the loose muslin which sunlight and birdsong warranted, she prepared to indulge her blandest vice.
4 Nov 1835
Only now begin to feel revived after yesterday’s journey and arrival. To catch sight of the bullock-wagon straining down the lane with our heavier trunks (and what our host describes as a few of the ‘unnecessary though indispensable luxuries’ purchased by him in Hobart Town) has refreshed me more than anything. Mr R. will be the happier for laying hands on his books, myself simply from having my own belongings around me. To make my home in the wilderness!
There is no reason why I shld sound so ungrateful when Garnet R. is kindness itself. He is now gone about the business of the farm, and again I will sound ungrateful if I say I am just as glad. There is no reason for this. My dislike is quite unreasonable. I can tell that my Mr R. does not intend to take an active part in the life at ‘Dulcet’ (not through any lack of affection for his brother). He has already informed me in private that sheep and cows were all very well when he was courting the farmer’s daughter, but in normal circumstances (outside of the pages of Virgil) they can only be counted among the bores. So it will be my duty to take an interest. There is no reason why I shld not. The country is both pretty and wild, the property evidently prosperous, the house spacious and filled with unexpected comforts, altogether unlike our own poor hugermuger farm at Z.
By all accounts the late Mrs Garnet Roxburgh’s means was inherited from her first husband. In the dining-room hang portraits of Mrs Garnet and her Dormer spouse. After a glass or two of wine Mr R. remarked to his brother that he would have removed the likenesses instead of keeping them there as reminders. G. R. points out that they are valued as property in these parts — the frames alone. To be sure these are elaborately carved and heavy gilded, but what is within them does not please. Mrs (Dormer) Roxburgh has a long, an ob-long face, very pallid and shiny, not unlike lard. The lips are shown unnatural red, though perhaps the artist has attempted to give her a liveliness her flesh lacked. A dull but shrewd woman, I wld say, and attracted evidently to gentlemen of high complexion. If G. R. is ruddy-skinned, the late Dormer’s cheeks were inflamed, and I recognize too well the look of his rather watery eye. Garnet too, enjoys his wine, from grapes grown on the place, the vines planted by Mr Dormer in the beginning. At dinner my usually abstemious husband was led on by his brother and caused me some embarrassment by proposing a toast which would have gladdened my heart in private, but not in the presence of G. R. I was too tired to more than pick at the fat goose they had killed by way of celebration, and cld not touch the pudding at all. I got away as soon as decency allowed and left the brothers to their childhood and youth.