‘I am willing to see Mr Pilcher and hear his story.’
The Commandant sprung open his watch, and at the same moment, a gong sounded in the outer regions. ‘Excellent!’ he declared. ‘I hope you are as ready as I for dinner. I am told there is a suckling pig. Or chaudfroid of fowl if you prefer it. And sillabub.’
‘Thank you, I have no appetite. I would rather go to my room.’
‘But will receive Pilcher this evening?’
‘If you and Mr Pilcher wish it.’
Mrs Lovell herself tried to tempt their guest to a very small helping of the chaudfroid, or at least a glass of sillabub, both of which she refused.
Mrs Roxburgh might have dozed had she not been lying so straight and tense in anticipation of the threatened visit. There were intimations of thunder besides, followed by a plashing of rain, a sluicing of leaves in the darkened garden. As aftermath, a scent of citrus and laid dust invaded the room. Even the light seemed to have been washed: it wore a pronounced, lemon gloss; the shadows were a bluer black.
Presently Miss Scrimshaw came to suggest she join them at the tea-table. ‘Your spirits will be lowered,’ she warned, ‘lying here alone in the dark.’
But Mrs Roxburgh declined tea. She casually remarked that she was still ‘half-expecting a visit’.
Miss Scrimshaw’s discretion was severely taxed, but she thought to reply, ‘Perhaps the person did not care to set out through the storm, and now that it is late, has decided to postpone coming. Your friend’s company should be doubly agreeable tomorrow.’
Mrs Roxburgh did not enlighten the spinster on her friend’s sex or the nature of the visit, and Miss Scrimshaw, who flourished on mystery, went away burgeoning.
The day following the visit that failed to materialize, Mrs Roxburgh rose even earlier than on her first morning at Moreton Bay and dressed herself in her black Paramatta, which those who served her had returned brushed and decent to her room. During the night she had conceived the notion of taking a solitary walk to acquaint herself with the neighbourhood before human activities influenced its character. That her own mind might influence what she saw and heard was a possibility she easily dismissed.
All was much as she had experienced already in company with Jack Chance the convict: the dust, the stones, the ruts over and against which she was soon toiling; the native trees scrubbier and more deformed for their contact with intrusive man; stone and brick houses in sturdy imitation of a tradition, together with more slapdash hovels in currency daub-and-wattle. It was the hour before arthritic age and inquisitive innocence begin to stir; the humblest dwelling still buzzed with the respectability conferred by sleep. Catching sight of the stranger, a sow with a string of squealing piglets galloped for safety, and a red, cankered dog snapped at the folds in a trailing skirt.
Upon climbing the hill she reached the inactive wind- or treadmill, round about it a litter of corn-cobs stripped of grain, near by a hand-cart which had lost a wheel. Children might have left off playing here had the scale of things been a lesser one and her knowledge incomplete. She crossed the trampled grass separating her from the stationary mill, to touch nail-heads which feet had polished in the worn boards, and become re-acquainted with some of the stations of purgatory.
A bird was calling; or was it warning?
It did in fact call her attention to voices at the foot of the hill, their volume amplified by morning stillness. They were men’s voices, growing louder, more cacophonous, as they approached the summit. Sometimes the babble was cut by the terser tone of orders, or again, by curses, in a different key. Mrs Roxburgh should not have felt panic-stricken; it was what she had wished in her heart, she realized: however painful the collision might prove, she was drawn to the companions of the man she may have wronged.
The gang mounting the hill through the scrub were now so close she distinctly heard the clanking of irons, the rustle of chains. Her impulse was to draw aside and remain the unseen observer, but fear, remorse, or some hellish desire to participate again in what she already knew through the experience of suffering, caused her to stand rooted to the track where the men would pass.
Heads were bowed as they struggled on towards her, so that they were not immediately faced with what must at a glance appear an illusion. The two guards preceding the chain-gang were the first to catch sight of the woman in black. They stiffened and gasped, jerking their muskets to the ready as though preparing to defend the prisoners against a rescue. Then the leaders of the convict file threw up their heads like so many dun-coloured animals. Startled into an abrupt halt, they could not avoid jolting their dependants into disarray; curses flew as body thumped against body and head cannoned off head.
Mrs Roxburgh roused herself to draw aside. All down the line, faces were feeding on the apparition. The mouth of one bumpkin of a guard was quivering in his fiery cheeks; another, of less sanguine cast, had buttoned up his lips in disapproval or disbelief. The prisoners’ expressions showed them either devouring the present with overt lust, or else exhuming the buried past with despair for what they re-discovered. As for Mrs Roxburgh, she was united in one terrible spasm with this rabble of men, their skins leathery above the unkempt whiskers, eyes glaring with hatred when not blurred by cataracts of grief, hands pared to the bone by hardship. She recognized it all, and over it, that familiar stench of foxes. If there were scars, at least they were hidden by the felons’ dress; nor would she feel their bodies shudder while asleep in her arms, though the rustle of never-motionless chains conveyed a distrust which no passion or tenderness of hers could ever help exorcize.
Then she realized that an uproar had broken out around her; the bush kindled, crackled and spat beneath the shower of oaths, ribaldry, laughter, and gusts of frustrated desire to which it was being subjected.
One fellow shouted, ‘I jobbed it inter better than ’er at ‘Ounslow, an’ got the pox for it.’
‘Ay, you can never tell where the pox lies.’
‘It could lie with me, I don’t mind tellin’ yer, Billy, if there was any chance uv runnin’ the colours up the bloody flagstaff.’
One of the guards had taken his musket-stock to the prisoners.
‘This is no place, ma’am, for a lady,’ the corporal-in-charge advised her in a wavering voice. ‘Better go down to the settlemen’.’
Mrs Roxburgh regretted having forgotten her veil. She hardly knew what she murmured in reply to the corporal. Whatever her feeble remark, it was drowned in the torrents of abuse, warnings, simulated farts, and above all, the sound of blows. She started walking as quickly and smoothly as her skirt and the sticks littering her path allowed, but had not escaped the length of the linked prison file when one of those she was passing, turned and spat. She felt his spittle trickling down her cheek.
The increased hullabaloo might have humiliated her worse had it not been partly her intent to submit herself to humiliation as punishment for her omissions and shortcomings. She was punished and humiliated none the less. As she dragged her skirt over the stones and tufts of uncharitable grass, it saddened her to think she might never become acceptable to either of the two incompatible worlds even as they might never accept to merge.
She went on, wiping the man’s spittle from her face, and after negotiating a sluggish creek, regained what the inhabitants doubtless regarded as the streets of their township. By now she should have felt liberated from her own morbid thoughts and intentions, free to return to the Commandant’s hospitable house, its citrus groves and pretty children, had she not sensed the approach of a second trial, as unavoidable as the first in that it was of her heart’s choosing.