Budgong was our cattle station on Budgong Creek, near the Shoalhaven River. It was a long way from Oldbury, across very rugged terrain; a week was hardly sufficient for the return journey to Budgong. Yet my mother was obliged to make that journey, owing to George Barton’s reclusive behaviour. She had no choice.
She went there twice: once in 1838, and again a year later. On both occasions she took with her certain convicts in whose competence and goodwill she placed enormous trust. James Barnett was the best of them. She came to rely a good deal on James Barnett, who had been a farmhand of some description back in the Old Country. I remember him well—he was quite tall for an assigned man, with heavy eyebrows and a serious, taciturn demeanour. If he had any reservations about my mother or her husband, he never displayed them. He was always calm and usually quite courteous, even when being berated by George Barton.
Barton disliked him intensely, the more so as my mother came to depend on him. There were arguments about James Barnett. No doubt my stepfather was jealous; three years later, he would formally accuse my mother, in a sworn statement, of having ‘improper and criminal intercourse’ with the convict. I know this because I read Barton’s statement after secretly unlocking my mother’s desk. That was in about 1844; we were still in Sydney, and I was perhaps fifteen. At the time, I was very anxious to uncover the secret of Belanglo. So I surreptitiously consulted my mother’s papers, wherein I discovered a copy of my stepfather’s accusation against her.
It was the usual rubbish. I had heard him scream such things at her on more than one occasion in the past. James Barnett was the only co-respondent actually named, but Barton did mention ‘convict men and various other persons’. He also mentioned ‘the illegitimate children of Jews and convicts’; it was a moment before I realised that he was referring to us. (That is to say, myself and my siblings).
Other young maidens, more gently and carefully reared, may have been dreadfully affected by such vicious slander. Certain of my school-fellows may have been catapulted into hysterical fits when confronted by the sure and certain knowledge that they had been identified, to the Equity Court, as half-Jewish bastards bearing an inherited Stain. But I was made of sterner stuff. Though the blood rushed to my head, and my heart began to pound, I swallowed my passion and laid the monstrous document to one side. For it was not germane to my inquiry.
In the same statement, Barton described how he refused to admit my mother into his bed after she returned from her first trip with James Barnett. This was a lie. Though my stepfather did stop sleeping beside his wife in the latter part of 1838, it was not on account of jealousy or disgust. It was on account of his own madness. Having decided that my mother could not be trusted, he took to locking himself in the back bedroom at night, where neither she nor anyone else could reach him. No doubt he slept with his pistol cocked. Certainly he kept his candle burning, for the light could be seen through his window.
This happened soon after he had stolen my mother’s keys.
You must understand the context of their disappearance, for it was all related to James Barnett, and the proposed trip to Budgong. My mother did not want to leave her children, you see. Not in the care of Eliza and George Barton, at any rate. She was concerned about our education—and our safety too. So she proposed that we hire a governess.
‘It is not my preferred choice,’ she said one day, with obvious bitterness, as we sat around the dinner table. ‘You know my feelings on the subject. But I have been left with no alternative.’
George Barton chewed for a while, moving his jaws heavily. By this time he rarely joined the family for dinner, preferring to eat alone. When he did appear, it was to cast a deadly pall over the entire meal, during which no one dared speak. Even a belch could expose one to the most violent imprecations. My stepfather once threw a cake-stand at James because he sneezed when his mouth was full.
Barton took care to swallow the contents of his own mouth before replying, ‘There will be no governess in my house.’
My mother laid down her fork. Seeing this, I shrank back—as did James and Emily and Louisa. We knew enough by then to recognise the first warning shot of an all-out battle.
‘I cannot neglect the children’s education,’ my mother said, her nostrils flaring dangerously. ‘If I must go on tours of inspection, then someone else has to teach them.’
To my surprise, George Barton did not respond by throwing his glass or slamming his fist on the table. Instead he began to drum his fingers on the cloth, very slowly, as he bared his teeth in a kind of ghastly rictus.
‘What is it?’ said my mother, a little wildly. Small spots of colour were appearing on her cheeks. ‘What are you grinning at?’
‘Do you think me a fool?’
‘What?’
‘I’ve dropped down what o’clock it is, never fear. I know yer bounce.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘You and Barnett both. And some bunter crony.’
‘You are making no sense whatsoever.’
‘Gammon. If you did it once, why not again? You’ve a taste for Dungaree-settlers, so why not for Norfolk Dumpling?’
While my stepfather’s jargon was incomprehensible, his tone could not be misconstrued. My mother folded her lips, and picked up her fork again.
‘There is no point discussing this now,’ she said.
‘There’s no point discussing it ever,’ Barton rasped. ‘I’ll not have a governess in my house, not while I’m master here. And I am the master. Don’t you forget it. I am still the master.’
It is impossible for me to know exactly what was going on inside Barton’s head. I am convinced, however, that he perceived a grave threat in my mother’s association with James Barnett. Whether or not he regarded them as lovers, he certainly came to see them as co-conspirators. Perhaps he believed that James Barnett was planning to replace him. Either that, or he regarded Barnett as a tool of John Lynch, who from his dank cell in Newcastle had ordered the convict to seduce my mother, and thereby gain access to George Barton.
You may be asking, at this point, what John Lynch had to do with us. He had disappeared from Oldbury long before, and had been acquitted of murder in any case. Why was my stepfather so preoccupied with Lynch? In Barton’s eyes, the absent convict seemed to constitute a growing and terrible threat, for no logical reason that I could identify. Was it a symptom of his burgeoning madness? Sometimes I thought so. At other times, I wondered if he knew more about Lynch than he had chosen to reveal.
I still wonder about this even now. It is not a question to which I am likely to find an answer. But in hindsight, I would say that long before the extent of Lynch’s depravity became known to the world, he had assumed a formidably intimidating aspect at Oldbury—purely on account of my stepfather’s unreasonable fear of the man. Thanks to George Barton, John Lynch never really left Oldbury. (Indeed, it was perhaps inevitable that he should have returned to the region shortly before he was banished from this world altogether.) With Barton perpetually fretting about Lynch, one could hardly fail to become conscious of a brooding sense of menace hovering above our farm, which dark cloud comprised all of its inhabitants’ worst fears about Lynch and Barton both.
Years later, when Lynch’s name had become a byword for wickedness, it seemed almost as if Barton’s perverse imagination had created this fiend—as if, by insisting that Lynch constituted an unparalleled danger, my stepfather had poisoned reality itself with his violent delusions. For John Lynch was never a true threat to my family. What affected us far more profoundly was Barton’s fear of him, which tainted the very air we breathed. Though John Lynch did, indeed, eventually expose himself as something less than human, his true nature was not revealed until long after he had become the embodiment of evil to those of us at Oldbury. My stepfather, you see, needed an enemy to blame for his irrational sense of dread. And whenever he began to fret about John Lynch—whenever the topic of Lynch was raised in his presence—my family had to brace itself for yet another bout of senseless and erratic behaviour.
It is quite possible, for instance, that my stepfather viewed the proposed governess as part of Lynch’s plot against him. Nothing would have struck him as far-fetched, or too incredible. Not in his state of mind. Only a man with a very fragile grasp of actual events would have felt constrained to steal my mother’s keys.
Let me give you an account of my mother’s keys. My mother’s keys were sacrosanct. They seemed almost a part of her, since she jingled and jangled wherever she went. She had mislaid them once or twice, but never for very long, since she normally carried them at her waist; at night she left them on a washstand beside her bed. Only in exceptional circumstances would she lay them aside, or surrender them to another’s keeping.
Yet they had vanished. This, at least, was her account: she had left them on her washstand and they had disappeared. The whole house was in an uproar. Even the huts were searched, much to the staff ’s disgruntlement. ‘She fails to attend, and we are blamed for it,’ I heard someone mutter, in the ensuing commotion. It must be confessed here that my mother was not wholeheartedly admired by her assigned staff. She lost her temper too readily, and was too quick to condemn. She had not my father’s easy, confident way with inferiors.
Perhaps she had been too long in an inferior position herself.
After scouring her bedroom and questioning the servants—to no avail—my mother began to think more clearly. She began to wonder how the theft had been accomplished. If the keys had been filched from a table or a window sill, that was one thing. But how could they have been taken from her washstand, now that George Barton made a point of locking all the doors and securing all the shutters every night?
So she turned on him a measuring stare.
‘I cannot account for it,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Unless you are mistaken. Are you sure that you left them on the washstand? Have you checked the cellar door?’
It is curious how reluctant my mother was to believe the worst. She actually hurried off to check the cellar door, when all of her children had long ago come to the correct conclusion. We were in the habit of watching our stepfather very closely, you see. We plotted his moods and observed his movements. We were therefore expecting the mottled complexion, nervous eyes and quick breathing of a man under siege. His most terrible fears had come true, after all; at night, while he was asleep, a mysterious stranger (perhaps one employed by the iniquitous John Lynch) had invaded the house and made off with its keys, for some nefarious purpose that might very well have been connected to his eventual assassination.
Yet he seemed quite unmoved. While my mother rushed about the place, snapping and scolding, he sat on the veranda in the sun, nursing a newspaper and puffing at his pipe. I remember watching him through the window of the breakfast room, with Emily and James beside me.
‘He did it, didn’t he, Charlotte?’ Emily whispered.
‘Of course,’ I replied.
‘Where could he have put them?’ asked James. ‘In his pocket?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Oh, poor Mama!’ Emily’s voice cracked. ‘You must tell her, Charlotte!’
But I had been thinking. I had been considering what I would have done, had I been George Barton. It was easier than you might believe to put myself in his shoes. For his malice had a childish cast to it; he was constrained by no sense of his own dignity, nor by the reasoned opinions of others.
I thought to myself: ‘George Barton has the only set of keys now’. And I went to my mother with a question.
‘Mama,’ I said, ‘why do you not ask Mr Barton for his keys? You might have left your own in the tea-chest. Or in Papa’s desk. Or in your jewel-case. And he might have locked them inside.’
My mother straightened. She had been poking around the campaign chest, where she often sat to do her accounts. But the drawers in the campaign chest were never locked, because someone had long ago lost the key.
We looked at each other for a moment, my mother and I. Though I was only ten years old at the time, we looked at each other like two grown women. Then something changed deep in her eyes. She turned abruptly, with a swish of blue merino, and marched from the sitting room.
‘Stay here,’ she said to me, over her shoulder.
It was a cruel command, in the circumstances. Yet I obeyed it. I stood in the doorway straining my ears, certain that my mother had gone to wrest her keys from George Barton’s clutches. And I was right. For James and Emily were still in the breakfast room, and they saw everything.
They later informed me that my mother accosted her husband on the veranda, asking him for his keys. ‘I have searched everywhere,’ she said, ‘and now I must check the tea-chest and the jewel-case.’
‘Not if they are locked,’ he replied, without lifting his gaze from the newspaper spread across his knees. ‘If they are locked, then you cannot have left the keys inside. And if you did leave the keys inside, then how can they be locked?’
‘Give me your keys,’ my mother insisted, stretching out her hand to receive them.
At this, my stepfather languidly raised his eyes to her face.
‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’ he rejoined.
‘Give me the keys, and I shall set my mind at rest.’
But he simply shook out his newspaper, and turned a page. ‘When I have finished my pipe,’ he declared, ‘I’ll check the tea-chest myself. And the jewel-case. At present I am occupied.’
My mother dropped all pretence, then. She put her hands on her hips and said: ‘Give me my keys.’
‘I don’t know where they are. You lost ’em.’
‘You took them.’
Poor James and Emily ducked beneath the window sill at this point. They felt sure that George Barton would lash out at my mother in his usual fashion. Great was their astonishment when he simply drawled: ‘Nonsense.’
‘Give them to me now!’
‘I would if I could,’ Barton assured her, with as much kindly patience as he was capable of mustering. ‘But I cannot.’
‘Empty your pockets!’
Very slowly, Barton set aside his newspaper. Then he stretched his arms until his joints cracked, pushed himself out of his chair at a leisurely pace, and turned out his pockets one by one.
There was nothing in any of them, except Barton’s own set of keys.
My mother was at a complete loss. What could she do, after all? The Oldbury estate was vast; it contained an infinite number of hiding places. And she was reluctant to break open every locked vessel to be found within its borders, for how could they ever be repaired afterwards? As for my stepfather, he refused to be goaded. Indeed, he was strangely tranquil for the next two days, seeming to take an enormous delight in playing the attentive and sympathetic husband. ‘Hush, children,’ he would say. ‘Yer poor mother’s nerves are sadly frayed since she lost her keys.’ He would pat her on the shoulder, or offer her his footstool. It must have driven my mother half mad with fury.
Certainly her distress began to show. I had never before seen her so short-tempered, or so careless in her grooming. Her ruffled hair and hectic impatience must have stemmed from her almost ceaseless search for the hidden keys, which she sought out in the oddest places: in flour bags, behind wardrobes, under the kitchen dresser. Or perhaps she was simply shaken to her core by the loss of control to which her keyless state had condemned her.
Without her keys, she was deprived of all independence. Without her keys, she could not effectively command her staff, nor feed her children. Every visit to the cellar, every cup of tea, every attempt to leave the house of a morning depended entirely on George Barton’s goodwill. Because he refused to hand over his own keys, my mother had to apply to him fifty times a day, or risk supplies being taken from unlocked storerooms.
You can imagine how much my stepfather enjoyed his position of absolute power. Naturally, he abused it with gusto. He would disappear for hours when ingredients were required, thereby spoiling jam tarts and suet puddings. Or he would refuse to get out of bed in the morning, so that my mother would be unable to leave the house.
But he had a fatal weakness. Knowing this, my mother did not fly into a grand passion. She had the sense to realise that, if she bided her time, he would finally drop his guard. And he did, of course. After a couple of days he began to drink, until he was so drunk that she was able to approach him without risk. Slumped at my father’s desk, he did no more than grunt when she removed his keys from his person.
I heard this grunt because I was hovering in the vestibule, waiting for her to leave the study.
‘You found them!’ I exclaimed, when I saw her emerge.
‘Shh!’ She put a finger to her lips. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but I shall find them.’
As she tripped away, I followed her, with many a backward glance. ‘Mama,’ I suggested, ‘perhaps you should lock up the study, first?’
‘Nonsense,’ my mother rejoined. ‘Why don’t you take the others to watch the shearing, Charlotte? You can finish your essay tomorrow,’ she said.
I obeyed her, but not out of cowardice. I knew that it would be a long time before my stepfather was clear-headed enough to realise how deceitfully he had been used. And I was correct in my assumption. Though he began to stir in the late afternoon, and was able to move about by early evening, it was not until we were all preparing to retire for the night that he reached in vain for his keys. Had he been in a less befuddled and liverish state, he might already have been alerted by my mother’s demeanour. For she was quite transformed, despite the fact that she had been unable to find her own keys. Her step was light, and her eyes glittered. There was a dangerous brightness in her tone. When I heard it, I was filled with dread. My heart was positively in my mouth as she helped with my hair-rags and commenced the bedtime story. It seemed to me that she was preparing herself for a very particular fight, and that George Barton, when he finally confronted her, would be throwing gunpowder on hot coals.
Sure enough, when he kicked open the nursery door, she whirled to face him like a fighting dog trapped in a corner.