Most of our convicts returned to Oldbury within a week. Only John Lynch and John Williamson remained in custody. They were sent up to Sydney, where they were tried in the Supreme Court. This trial was set for the twelfth of August, and George Barton, as a material witness, was summoned to appear.
Do not ask me exactly when his summons arrived. In July, perhaps? Whenever it was, I could not have received more welcome news. I would lie in bed trying to calculate the length of Barton’s proposed absence. The trip into town would take several days, as would the trip back. For how long, I wondered, would the trial run? A day? Two days? I made a special application to the Lord one night. ‘Please God,’ I prayed, ‘let Mr Barton be away for more than a week.’
I was on my knees at the time.
Four months had elapsed between Lynch’s arrest and his trial. During that interval, I had spared the convict hardly a thought. For one thing, there had been very little talk about him. Not once had I overheard the servants discussing his fate. Not once had anyone mused upon his guilt or innocence at the dining table. Like George Barton’s flogging, the subject of John Lynch had been stringently avoided—at least in front of me. Yet I am quite sure that this overwhelming silence did not indicate a lack of interest. Looking back, I am inclined to wonder if the cause might have been fear. Fear of my mother, perhaps, who did not want her children unnerved? Fear of Lynch’s confederates? If Lynch had killed Thomas Smith for speaking out of turn about the attack on George Barton—as was later claimed in the newspapers—there can be no telling what his friends would have done in similar circumstances.
Or perhaps the fear was a kind of unease, engendered by that curious contrast between the innocent-seeming man himself and the crime that he was charged with. People are always inclined to fear what they cannot understand. The fact that a cheerful, common, jaunty little Irishman should have revealed so black a heart is almost beyond understanding. It casts such doubt on human nature that the majority of folk would prefer to turn away and ignore its implications, rather than face them squarely.
At the time, I gave no thought to the reasoning behind this curious attitude of discretion. For I was preoccupied with other matters. There was the attack on our rector’s family, for instance. There was the opening of the Kentish Arms on the Mereworth estate, an event that prompted my mother to meet with my uncle for the first time in many months. (She returned from the encounter full of scorn and disgust. ‘What kind of a man,’ she said, ‘enlists his wife to supervise the distribution of spirits to all the scaff and raff of the district? Better to live humbly, in a bark hut, than expose her to such degradation.’) Finally, there was the utter collapse of that domestic harmony which had always distinguished our house, even during the last, terrible days of my father’s fatal illness.
The first cracks appeared very quickly. Looking back, it is easy to plot the course of George Barton’s descent into madness, though at the start we had no notion of what exactly we were witnessing. Every outrage came as a terrible shock; only gradually did we learn to expect (and fear) the unexpected. After some consideration, I would say that Bunny was the first casualty of my stepfather’s bottomless rage. Do you remember Bunny, our pet kangaroo? He would come to the stockyard of an evening to be fed, and was quite a favourite with everyone—except George Barton. George Barton warned us about Bunny. ‘There’s not a beanstalk nor a turnip green is safe from those beasts,’ he said. ‘If one sprig of sage goes missing, I’ll have its hide.’
This must have been in early April, and there were still some late figs on a tree near one of our sunniest walls. When some of these figs disappeared, Barton blamed Bunny. He pointed out that only the fruit on the lowest branches, within Bunny’s reach, had vanished. And he forbade us to feed the poor creature anymore. ‘It must be chased off,’ he ordered, with the jovial menace that characterised many of his pronouncements when he was sober. ‘It must not be encouraged. Sentiment is all very well, but we cannot fill our bellies with it. Unless it learns to keep clear, it’ll meet its Maker, I warn you. Just stay away from the stockyard, and it will soon understand.’
‘You should stay away from the stockyard in any case,’ my mother added, when I turned to her in protest. ‘It is not safe when the men are working, and James has fallen off that fence often enough.’
‘I will not climb it again, Mama, I promise!’ James cried, but my mother just shook her head, smiling.
‘That is what you always say—and you always break your word,’ she replied. ‘I believe that fence must exert some strange, supernatural force.’
‘You obey yer mother, now,’ Barton added, reaching across the table to lay his hand on Mama’s. ‘Yer Ma knows what is best for you.’
We children were not impressed by this argument. My mother may have known what was best for us, but she appeared to have lost sight of Bunny’s best interests. I had my suspicions about the assigned men, who could be very cunning when it came to stealing food. What if one of them had taken the figs, and shown enough restraint to make it seem as if Bunny was at fault? Emily, for her part, was terribly concerned about the kangaroo’s health. What if it should become ill and weak? What if it should starve?
‘It will wait and wait for us, and we won’t be there,’ she fretted.
In the end, we defied George Barton. We agreed that I should leave kitchen scraps near the stockyard whenever Barton was away from the house. As the eldest sibling, I shouldered the risk myself. I reasoned that, if caught, I would have the best chance of formulating a believable excuse. For Emily had a tender conscience, and James was still too small to have completely mastered the English language.
I made my secret trips for about a week. Then one morning, when I took some fig skins and pumpkin rind to the stockyard, I found Bunny waiting for me.
He was hanging from the lowest bough of a nearby gum tree, gutted and cloaked in flies.
I brought up my breakfast then and there, before hiding in a corner of the stables. It was a while before I could speak. You have to understand the threat implied. I said nothing to my mother. How could I? Though I knew in my heart that she was unaware of Bunny’s dreadful fate, I had nevertheless disobeyed her strict instructions. And it was Bunny who had suffered the punishment due to me.
I said nothing to George Barton, either. I simply could not find the words. We would meet on the staircase or at the table, and he would tip me a sly wink, or sit chewing slowly, watching me with a glint in his eye. The silence between us grew and grew. It was an exclusive silence, for I had told my brother and sisters nothing about poor Bunny. I had said only that the scraps were being left untouched. ‘Perhaps Bunny has found a lady kangaroo, and married,’ I suggested, for Emily’s benefit. ‘Perhaps he is too busy with his babies to spare us a thought.’
A horrifying event, you will agree. It made me very wary of my stepfather. But our lives were still not distinguished by unrelieved misery, for in those early days Barton was capable of self-control. I distinctly remember seeing him near the stables once, teaching James how to crack a whip. He repaired the swing near the dairy with his own hands, and dressed one of the dogs in my mother’s leghorn bonnet and lace tucker. Sometimes he would sit in the sun reading a newspaper, and when we children passed would toss a coin at us, to see who could catch it. Sometimes he would open a pot of jam, and eat perhaps half of it with a spoon before passing the rest to James or me, so that we could make ourselves sick.
It was James who attracted his attention, initially. Before I rose up to challenge him, drawing his fury down upon myself as a conductor draws lightning, George Barton was chiefly interested in James. Not that he was much interested. But when he did pay us any mind, it was James who seemed to catch his notice. There was talk of my brother’s abilities with a firearm, and on horseback. Barton would prod him at dinner about his future role as master of the estate. Would he learn how to brand his own calves? How did he propose to deal with the gully-rakers who preyed on Oldbury’s stray cattle, incorporating the beasts into their own herds? What would he do about the native dogs, and the swarming parrots, and all the other creatures that would strip us naked, given half the chance?
‘He will address that problem when he is ready,’ my mother would say. ‘He is young yet, and will make a fine master when he is grown.’
‘Oh aye,’ Barton would rejoin, ‘if he does not stuff his head too full of nonsense about Greeks and seashells, he will do well enough.’
I am convinced that Barton nursed a deeply buried grudge against my brother for being my father’s heir. Though not immediately apparent, it became more obvious as the weeks rolled by. Even as he taught James to crack a whip, and tie a sailor’s knot, he also began to plague him with tormenting little challenges, proposing that he mount a frisky horse, for instance, or climb up onto the roof to ‘view his domain’. My brother (not being a fool) would decline to cooperate, and ignite a slow-burning rage within my stepfather which surfaced once or twice in his complaints that my brother had no ‘bottom’. James, said Barton, was altogether too ladylike.
Then followed the game of hide and seek.
It happened early one afternoon. Emily and I had looked everywhere: the dairy, the stables, the kitchen, the piggery, all the rooms in the house except my father’s study, which was kept locked. We had wandered down to the creek and back again. We had even explored the area around the convict huts. But we were unable to find James.
‘We surrender!’ I yelled up the staircase—across the yard—into the woodpile. ‘James! You win!’
There was no reply.
When he failed to join us for dinner, I became worried. My mother was also concerned. She knew that James would never miss a meal—not even to tease us. So she left her mutton cooling on her plate, and went on a tour of the house and its immediate environs, calling his name. She even enlisted Eliza’s help. After about an hour, more of the staff were instructed to join the search. They did a short sweep of the bush behind their huts, and another of the land beyond the creek. Someone proposed that a message be sent to the police at Bong Bong, who had often enlisted the services of a fine black tracker known as Michael. There were no native men or women working for us at that time, though they often came and went; had there been even a gin about the place, my mother would certainly have appealed to her. By this time the shadows were long, and Mama was becoming quite frantic.
You may be asking: where was George Barton, all this time? The fact is, he had gone off into the bush to supervise the felling and splitting of timber. My mother knew this, and was half hoping, I am sure, that James had gone with him. But her husband returned without her son. ‘The young rascal,’ Barton said, when she broke the news, and then disappeared upstairs to wash his face and hands.
It was my mother who finally found James. She went down to the cellar for some wine to calm her nerves, and discovered him there. He was locked inside. I cannot tell you exactly what she said to James, or what he said to her. I only know that she carried him back upstairs as if he had been Louisa, and spent a long time nursing him on his bed, like an infant.
Need I point out that only two people at Oldbury possessed the keys to our cellar?
No one heard what Mama said to her husband afterwards. The discussion did not take place in their bedroom, of that I am sure. But the following day, my mother appeared with a bruise on her cheek—for which Barton was almost certainly responsible. I was not immediately aware of this. If I had any suspicions, they were banished when I saw how helpful and affectionate he was towards my mother in the wake of his offence. I was not then accustomed to the pattern of his moods.
I knew enough, however, to make my report when Mama was alone.
‘Mama,’ I said, ‘James was locked in the cellar. Mr Barton locked him in there.’
‘Mr Barton regrets that very much,’ my mother replied. She was sorting through some linen, her head bent over her work. ‘It was a silly accident, and will not happen again.’
‘But Mr Barton said something to James,’ I pointed out. ‘James did not call out to us for help because of what Mr Barton said.’
My mother’s hands stopped moving.
‘What did Mr Barton say?’ she asked, without looking up.
‘I don’t know, Mama. James will not repeat it.’
Nor did he ever break his silence. But he was not the same boy subsequently. I can testify to that. Something inside him had withered and died.
As for the rest of us, we became far more cautious. Wherever Mr Barton went, we did not. Only when he was away could we enjoy the house and its surroundings with impunity. During his visit to Sydney, in August, we were restored to a state of happy carelessness such as we had enjoyed before my mother chained herself to George Barton unto death. And because we were children, we delighted in our freedom without thought for the morrow.
The morrow came, however—as it always does. Barton returned very late one afternoon, and retired almost immediately to bed. The next morning he eschewed breakfast, but we heard him roundly abusing a convict in the dairy. My mother promptly came to a decision.
‘Eliza,’ she said, dabbing at her mouth with a napkin, ‘please take the children to Sutton Forest today. They have been so good that they deserve a reward.’
‘Aye, Mam,’ said Eliza. ‘Shall we take the gig?’
‘No. You must walk.’ As our faces all fell, my mother added: ‘But I shall give you each a few pennies so that you may buy whatever you choose from Mrs Davey’s shop.’
So we walked to Sutton Forest. Much has been made of my sister Louisa’s indefatigable exploration of the Blue Mountains, and the walks that she took across their escarpments as an adult, through ferny gorges and over wooded ridges, sometimes riding her horse and sometimes leading it, her habit looped up to form trousers and her specially designed plant wallet slung over her shoulder. I have no reason to doubt that her excursions were as wide-ranging as she claimed. But let me tell you now that she was a most unenthusiastic participant in that walk to Sutton Forest. It was a damp sort of trip, because there was mist about, hanging over Gingenbullen and drifting between the lofty boughs of the eucalypts, which were as pale as if recently peeled, their bark hanging like shredded rags, or strewn across the ground in heaps. The track, consequently, was moist, and the branches that we brushed against were unpleasantly clammy. Louisa disliked this. She grew tired quickly. She dragged her feet, and whimpered, and refused to sing songs or play games or watch for birds in the trees. Thanks largely to Louisa, I cannot recall that walk with any delight.
At last, however, it ended. We came to Sutton Forest and crowded into Mrs Davey’s shop, which was hardly big enough to contain us all. If you have read Tom Hellicar’s Children, you will already be familiar with this shop. Like the one belonging to Mrs Susannah Page, it was in the front room of a wooden cottage, stacked with bottles of castor oil, tins of fish, bundles of tobacco, bags of sugar, jars of sweets. Even the open cask of treacle was there, though I never saw any letters being fished out of it. That was just Louisa’s fancy. Mrs Davey was always very efficient when it came to mail, whether claimed or unclaimed. And she also took delivery of newspapers.
As you may imagine, the difficult task of selecting a treat was not accomplished with any haste. There was much on offer: lozenges, lollipops, sugarplums, marbles, almonds, currants, silk ribbons . . . My own eye immediately fell on a sheaf of lavender writing paper, which ravished me; I bought it at once, before anyone else could snatch it away. I was then free to entertain myself while my siblings tried to decide between the liquorice and the lollipops. After drifting about for a few minutes, I noticed a fairly recent edition of the Sydney Gazette. It was dated August the thirteenth. With real interest I surveyed the advertisements on the front page, before flipping over to the second and third.
Mr Barton’s name leapt out at me from the court reports.
‘A gentleman named Barton,’ I read, ‘from the neighbourhood of Bong Bong was called as a witness yesterday in a case of murder, before Mr Justice Burton. When in the box, such was his appearance, that his Honor felt it necessary to call in the assistance of a medical practitioner in order to ascertain whether or not he was sober'.
The doctor then took Mr Barton into a private room for a long consultation, before returning to be sworn. He declared that Mr Barton had been drinking, and was not in a fit state to give evidence. ‘Mr B. himself,’ the report continued, ‘by way of confirming his idea of sobriety, appealed to the prisoners to say how they thought he was.
He was finally placed in the custody of the Sheriff, and ordered to stay in prison until he had paid a fifty-pound fine for contempt of court. John Lynch was not named.
You may imagine my feelings when I read all this. I was shocked and disgusted—and also alarmed. It seemed to me that George Barton would not take kindly to such public disgrace. I already had some inkling of his inflamed pride, which would brook no challenge or insult. I dreaded what we would encounter when we returned to Oldbury. Had Barton read this newspaper or not? Almost certainly he had. On the thirteenth of August, he would still have been in Sydney.
He had probably travelled back to Bong Bong in the same coach as the Gazette.
I said nothing to the others. But you may be sure that I did not rush home with any eagerness. How I dragged my feet on the return journey! How I lingered over every rivulet and insect that we passed! All to no avail, though; at last we arrived, and were greeted by an eerie silence.
It was still damp and misty. No one would have been inclined to linger outside, except to do a job of work. Moisture dripped from the eaves. Smoke drifted from the chimney. A dairy pan lay in the mud near the veranda, shot full of holes.
It was a promise of things to come.