Captain Lovell’s hand guided his guest out of the carriage and compelled her up the veranda steps. ‘You are almost as punctual as Miss Scrimshaw would have wished.’ He glanced back in ironic approval at his subaltern, who came as close to a giggle as an Awful Presence might allow herself.
‘Come!’ he commanded the prisoner. ‘Everybody has been waiting to see you.’
‘Oh, please!’ Mrs Roxburgh protested.
Miss Scrimshaw came to her charge’s defence. ‘Poor Mrs Roxburgh is fatigued to say the least.’
In the light from the doorway the Commandant’s eyes were an enamelled blue; he had the cast of face which might flush and swell, a mouth which might brood whenever thwarted; all of which would have amounted to flaws in another, but added to Captain Lovell’s looks.
The looks or flaws were on the verge of displaying themselves when the one who was presumably his wife appeared, surrounded by a clutch of little children, fair-haired, blue-eyed, all of them agog. The mother too, was on the fair side. She made a rather crumpled impression, not unlike the gauzy bonnet which must surely have been hers before handed over to the object of her charity.
‘Everybody will want to see her, but not before she has put her feet up.’ Mrs Lovell decided with a firmness unexpected in one so frail and evidently harassed. ‘Mrs Roxburgh is not on parade, Tom.’
Although he made some show of grumbling and snuffling, the Commandant accepted his rebuke amiably enough. ‘To hear your mother, anybody would think me a tyrant. Wouldn’t they, Kate?’ he appealed to the eldest little girl, who considered his question too foolish to answer.
At the head of her platoon of children, and seconded by the inevitable Miss Scrimshaw, Mrs Lovell marched their guest to the room she was to occupy.
‘After all you have endured I can imagine that you will appreciate being left alone. Not that you haven’t been alone enough,’ Mrs Lovell added, and blushed, ‘lost in the bush for months on end — except for the company of blacks, of course, as we have heard — and the man who rescued you.’ Mrs Lovell blushed deeper still. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘a room of your own, with the comforts civilization can offer, will have its appeal.’
Mrs Roxburgh realized that she was standing stripped before Mrs Lovell, as she must remain in the eyes of all those who would review her, worse than stripped, sharing a bark-and-leaf humpy with a ‘miscreant’. To the children, she was of even greater interest: they saw her squatting to defecate on the fringe of a blacks’ encampment. Only the children might visualize her ultimate in nakedness as she gnawed at a human thighbone in the depths of the forest. Finally these children might, by their innocence and candour, help her transcend her self-disgust.
Meanwhile the mother, with renewed tact and kindness, had produced a jug of barley-water, and a dish of fruit ‘from our own garden’. If Mrs Roxburgh preferred to retire, a servant would bring a collation to her room. ‘Do not think, Mrs Roxburgh, that my husband, or anybody, expects of you anything you would not wish. We are so happy to see you alive.’
After which, Mrs Lovell sailed off in her swell of children.
‘You should know, my dear,’ Miss Scrimshaw reminded, ‘that you are something of a heroine, and must pay the price accordingly.’
‘I cannot claim to be what I am not.’
Miss Scrimshaw was too well-bred or too wise to persist.
Mrs Roxburgh was relieved that, thanks to crape, she had been able to hide her rising distraction until after the spinster had removed herself, when on raising the veil she saw that she had bitten into her lips, and that the blood was running. Soon after, she threw herself upon the bed, a bundle of falsehood and charitable clothes, to give way to what was partly guilt, and partly frustrated passion.
She resumed control of herself to admit the servant bearing the cold collation on a tray. She was ravenous, and fell to stuffing herself with ham and mutton alternately, until she got the hiccups. It was the all-too-fat meat, together with her own greed and sensuality.
When at last she slept, she dreamed of a transcendent love which in its bodily form walked just ahead and might ever elude her, at Putney or anywhere else in the actual world.
She awoke early, refreshed to the extent that she imagined herself on a visit to a friend: Mrs Daintry perhaps, in Gloucestershire? or could it be the visit, much discussed but never paid, to Mrs Aspinall at Hobart Town? She was relieved to dismiss the latter possibility by seeing where she really was.
She rose and, after exploring her room, decided she must wash herself at the wash-stand put there for that purpose. Soap crude by standards other than colonial made her laugh at least as she lathered herself happily. Yes, she was happy. She would have enjoyed dressing her hair in style had there been enough of it.
During the night somebody had removed her weeds and laid out in their place a muslin gown patterned with knots of pansies, or heart’s-ease she had heard them called. When she had put on the fresh petticoats she also found, and over them the pretty dress, and finished by tying its sash in cobalt silk, she saw that from being so long without them she had overlooked the stays, and was forced to repair the omission, and make herself seemly.
Already there were signs of life from other quarters: pots dragged across the surface of a kitchen range, the scent of wood-smoke rising, a man’s voice giving orders. She hoped she might avoid discovery, and actually did, even by children. She made her descent through the Commandant’s garden by natural slopes and artificial terraces, where shaddocks and lemons, bananas and guavas appeared on congenial terms with cabbage- and tea-trees and the stiff cut-outs of native palms. A palm-leaf cut her hand as the result of her looking to it for support.
On reaching the bottom-most terrace she arrived at a flight of stone steps leading down to the muddy river. A white egret stalking in the shallows rose and flapped into the distance. She heard what could have been the crow-minder’s rattle on the opposite shore. She looked about her, instinctively and furtively. At such an hour she might have succeeded in making her escape had it not been for the numerous innocent kindnesses she had experienced at Moreton Bay.
Instead she stood awhile enjoying the moist, palpitating air before returning voluntarily to the prison to which she had been sentenced, a lifer from birth.
Halfway up the slope she encountered a deputation consisting of Kate the eldest Lovell, a white-haired boy, and two younger tottery girls.
Kate informed her, ‘We’ve come to find you, Mrs Roxburgh, and bring you to breakfast.’ Her speech had the stiffness of formal composition, the others simpering in time with their sister, until at the end of it, everybody burst.
Mrs Roxburgh again received the impression that they visualized her as the naked survivor, who doubtless the moment before had finished defecating behind a clump of their father’s bamboos.
So she smoothed her dress before appealing to them, ‘You will breakfast with me, I hope, and give me courage to face the morning.’
It was too strange for them to contemplate for long.
One little girl announced very firmly, ‘We had our breakfast.’
‘We’ve got our lessons’, the boy told, ‘with Miss Scrim. If we don’t do them our father will whip us.’
Mrs Roxburgh heard herself, ‘It’s right, surely, to carry out the tasks you’ve been set, and to expect punishment if you don’t.’
Her too spontaneous moralizing might have depressed her had not the children offered hands and brought her up the last of the slope. They seemed to take sententiousness as much for granted as the surroundings in which they found themselves.