Mr Dawes was seldom seen in the settlement, but one morning I saw him walking towards me along the dusty track that went past the barracks. Even from a distance I could see his smile, white in his sun-browned face, and as we came closer to each other I thought that he was going to embrace me then and there.
Of course he did not. He stopped and took off his disgraceful hat with the sweat-darkened band and the split where it had been creased once too often, and we bowed to each other, sedate as a pair of churchwardens.
– Good morning, Mrs Macarthur, he said, and the cleverest soul alive could not have guessed that the afternoon before he had been closer to Mrs Macarthur than any man save her husband had ever been. In fact he had been closer than her husband. Mrs Macarthur’s husband could do what he wished with Mrs Macarthur’s legs and arms, but he could not touch her being.
Only when we were safely past each other did I wonder who might have seen. In this place there was always someone to see, even if it was no one as dangerous as Captain Tench. Nothing had happened, nothing had been said. Nothing was visible. And yet the air rang and swooned. It was hard to believe that others did not feel the world humming when Mr Dawes and I were near each other.
The thing was madness. It was true that Mr Dawes had few visitors from the settlement. True, too, that he and I were safely hidden in our leafy refuge, and Mrs Brown and Hannaford guarded the path. Still, I knew that Tench visited now and then, and perhaps there were others.
We were mad to think it was possible. But we did not think, only floated from one meeting to the next. I look back now with amazement and a tingle of remembered fear. Fear, and passion too. I have not forgotten what it was like to lie with him. Sitting here, an old woman, I feel my blood stir at the memory, a blush that tells me I am not dead yet.
What an unfathomable thing, like a strange warped orrery, all this business is, the puzzle of desire. Each man runs along his own orbit, and each woman runs along hers, each thinking they have set their own course. And yet we are all being cranked by the same invisible handle, impelled by the same forces: the urge to join with another, the yearning to find a fellow soul. All of us moving, but the distance between us never decreasing.
And for myself, what was the force turning my handle? Desire: what a discovery that was. Ambition, too: I loved meeting again that bold young woman who had thought herself in command of her destiny.
And, if I may tease you, my unknown reader, let me remind you that you have only my word for any of this. This story, of the tangling of two hearts in Sydney in 1791, is recorded nowhere but in the document you are reading. It may appear to speak with authority, but might it be nothing more than the mischievous invention of a sly old woman?