Mrs Roxburgh would have liked to restore the woman’s spirits, but in the absence of inspiration, could but murmur, ‘Thank you, Mary,’ and bow her head, and go inside.
The morning was full of coming and going, slammed doors, voices raised but never enough, laughing and scuttling through the passages (lessons were evidently waived). Mrs Roxburgh’s cell seemed the only corner of the house to remain untouched by the cutter’s arrival.
Of course she should have gone out and joined in the excited confusion. If she hesitated to celebrate her longed-for release becoming actual fact, it was because she could not ignore a future fraught with undefined contingencies. Had the walls but opened at a certain moment, she might even have turned and run back into the bush, choosing the known perils, and nakedness rather than an alternative of shame disguised.
It was close on dinner-time when Miss Scrimshaw burst into the room in a state of high importance. ‘You will have heard the news,’ she began somewhat breathily, ‘but perhaps not every detail of it, because I myself have been kept in the dark until almost the last moment. Mrs Lovell is so fatigued the Commandant, in the kindness of his heart, is sending her to Sydney for a change of air. The children, who are most of them too small to be left behind, will accompany her. And I shall go to enforce a little necessary discipline!’ The governess actually performed a stately step or two. ‘We shall sail the day after tomorrow depending on a favourable wind.’
Then Miss Scrimshaw, remembering, turned a deep maroon, which mounted by way of her scrawny neck into her brown, downy cheeks. ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘how I run on, when it is you who have most cause for rejoicing at the cutter’s arrival!’
‘I hardly know,’ Mrs Roxburgh blurted back. ‘Yes, I am glad, of course, but shall be the happier for your company — for my return to the world. I have been so long out of it, I may not easily learn to adapt myself to its ways.’
Dissolving in the emotions of the moment the two women were carried away to the extent of embracing. ‘I expect we shall make our blunders,’ Miss Scrimshaw predicted, ‘but would you not say that life is a series of blunders rather than any clear design, from which we may come out whole if we are lucky?’
Then she laughed, and detached herself, and adjusted her fichu, and sternly resorted to practical matters. ‘If we are to be ready, we must start at once to systematize. The children alone! Poor Mrs Lovell is too distracted, and then, you may not know, she is expecting.’
With some diffidence Mrs Roxburgh offered Miss Scrimshaw her services.
But the spinster remembered she had not included in her recitative a detail not at first sight related to the practical. ‘We shall have with us on board a passenger not of our party, a Mr Jevons from London, who has taken advantage of the cutter’s mission to Moreton Bay to look up his connections, the young Cunninghams.’
Miss Scrimshaw glanced at her friend, it could have been to see whether the latter might accuse her of irrelevance, but finding no indication of this, she gladly forged on. ‘Mr Jevons, I gather, is a merchant of substantial means, but let us not condemn him for that.’ Miss Scrimshaw was so indulgent this morning. ‘A widower,’ she added, to allow the man a modicum of virtue. ‘I happened to be passing the Cunninghams’ cottage, and in this way made their connection’s acquaintance. I dare say we shall find him agreeable and helpful company.’ With this prediction, Miss Scrimshaw left to compose a list of ‘material necessities’.
Mrs Roxburgh’s own possessions and needs were so immaterial and few that she soon followed, and under Miss Scrimshaw’s command, set to work collecting spencers, booties, blankets, shawls, button-boots for pairs of feet descending in the scale from small to smallest, ‘Kate’s old bonnet with the primroses; she looks so pretty in it’, pencils, primers, cutlery, bedding.
‘And potted meat!’ the quartermaster almost shouted. ‘And six — at least — four-pound loaves!’
‘My dear Miss Scrimshaw,’ Mrs Lovell sighed from the sofa where she was prudently resting, ‘we are not embarking on the voyage home, and at Sydney shall be staying with the Huxtables.’
‘It’s as well to be prepared’, Miss Scrimshaw advised, ‘for any and every eventuality.’
When at dinner-time the Commandant appeared he made an immediate point of congratulating Mrs Roxburgh on her speedy departure for civilization. Captain Lovell had benefited by his magnanimity towards his wife and family; he had never looked (nor in all probability felt) handsomer, as he sat at table after saying grace, hands folded on his tunic, the wedding-ring exposed, or chucked Kate under her chin, and complimented Miss Scrimshaw on her downright military efficiency. The world was for the moment, if not always, Captain Lovell’s.
During dinner his wife, stirring the barley broth Mr Cunningham had prescribed for her, inquired as a matter of course, ‘Are they leaving you in peace, my love?’
‘Fairly so. I cannot complain,’ Captain Lovell answered. ‘There is always the tobacco question. And Bragg has made his third attempt, this time with a kitchen fork.’ The children’s presence did not allow him to elaborate.
All attacked their dinner, and some complained that the mutton was tough, not to say black and nasty. Little Totty was sent from the room. But Mrs Roxburgh had to presume that the Commandant was what the world holds to be just.
When they rose from table she approached him and said, ‘I must remind you of my petition, sir.’
‘Your petition, Mrs Roxburgh?’ His eyebrows started up, while his smile appeared the more brilliant for a slight dash of mutton fat.
‘For the convict,’ she said, ‘the man Chance — to whom I owe my survival.’
‘And why must I be reminded? My purpose at Moreton Bay is to see that justice is done.’
Endowed with official integrity and domestic virtues, this imposing gentleman should have convinced her more easily.
‘Do you not trust me?’ he asked.
‘I should,’ she mumbled, ‘but no longer know,’ and broke off.
He tapped her on the wrist. ‘You should have more confidence in yourself.’
After which, she left him, and allowed herself to be burdened with all that Miss Scrimshaw considered necessary for the voyage.
Later in the afternoon her commanding officer reported on returning from a personal reconnaissance of the immediate approaches, ‘I do believe we have callers, and that it is Mrs Cunningham, the surgeon’s wife — with her relative — Mr Jevons — from London.’
For one of her rank and experience Miss Scrimshaw appeared flustered. ‘I should tell you, Mrs Roxburgh, that he wears a ring with a diamond in it. But of course a diamond, though not to my taste — on a man — need not make him morally reprehensible.’
To reassure her friend Mrs Roxburgh said, ‘Mr Roxburgh — my husband — wore a signet ring.’
‘Ah,’ Miss Scrimshaw approved, ‘that is what one expects, surely, of a gentleman?’
There was no time for more, since Mrs Cunningham and her suspect cousin were already mounting the veranda steps.
The surgeon’s wife was a heavily built, swarthy young woman who would have appeared plain beside her spouse had he been present. Perhaps she had brought from the Jevons side some of its ‘substantial means’.
As for Mr Jevons, he too was large and dark, well-fleshed, but solid in his fleshiness. Mrs Roxburgh was fatally drawn to look for the ring with the diamond in it, and in doing so noticed the wedding band on the next finger but one. Whereas this same token seemed to stimulate the self-satisfaction inherent in the Commandant, it made Mr Jevon’s hand look curiously vulnerable. She hastened to dismiss her thought as a foolish fancy, probably conceived as a result of her own unfortunate experience.